Lilo & Stitch
Chris Sanders’s and Dean DeBlois’s 2002 cel animated “Lilo & Stitch” has always been special to me. The film approaches the “E.T.” formula of an alien befriending a human with a rowdy sense of humor to go with the heart of an unlikely friend helping put a family back together. When it was announced as a live-action remake possibility, I’m not going to lie it terrified me.
One of the things I am most grateful for is that Sanders (who’s since directed “The Wild Robot,” “How to Train Your Dragon,” “The Croods” and “The Call of the Wild”) has consistently been the voice of Stitch in every iteration of the character. Him reprising that role here, even as “Marcel the Shell With Shoes On’s” director (Dean Fleischer-Camp) brings the character into live-action, gives an authenticity to how Experiment 626 is portrayed that that level of consistency can only bring.
More so than the majority of Disney’s live-action adaptations, Fleischer-Camp’s film deviates in a lot of ways from the breezy, energetic 85-minutes of the original film. The film focuses much more of its energies on the broken family unit of Lilo (played here by Maia Kealoha) and Nani (Sydney Agudong), with the older sister struggling to take care of the younger one after their parents have died. It begins, as the original does, in outer space, and at the trial of Jumba (Zach Galifianakis), the deranged scientist who created Stitch, and Stitch’s escape from custody before he finds his way to Earth, but the sci-fi elements of the film are muted compared to the emotional story being told about the sisters, and how Stitch compounds their stressors even as Lilo finds someone she can connect with finally.
The screenplay by Chris Kekaniokalani Bright and Mike Van Waes finds the right balance between the sci-fi silliness of the narrative and the heart of the story, but there are some changes that had me unsure how I feel about it. One in particular had me sad for its loss, and it’s one that was crucial to Stitch’s emotional journey, and how he relates to Lilo and Nani and the concept of Ohana, and it made his plea at the end to stay with the family that much stronger. There’s another big one that is ruffling a lot of feathers, but which is- in the context of the film’s added depth of Lilo and Nani’s story- earned by the way the film handles it, and how it builds up the community around Nani and Lilo. It’s not just them; they have others around them for whom Ohana matters.
As a fan of the original, though, this one is definitely one of the more interesting and entertaining of the live-action remakes in Disney’s arsenal. (Though it’s not as impactful as David Lowry’s “Pete’s Dragon”- for me, still the best of these remakes- it has a lot of the same characteristics.) Stitch is still a lovable menace, and the performances by Kealoha and Agudong as Lilo and Nani are wonderful. I still enjoyed Jumba and Pleakly’s (Billy Magnussen) antics tracking Stitch on Earth, and I liked the way Cobra Bubbles (Courtney B. Vance) enters the story, even if his part in the arc is diminished by another, actual CPS worker (played by original Nani Tia Carrere). And for me? The film still got its heart in the right place, albeit in its own way. Twenty three years after he first rocked the big screen, Stitch remains a singular presence in Disney’s legacy.
