Maybe a Live-Action Lilo & Stitch Remake Wasn’t Such a Great Idea
Did the people who remade Lilo & Stitch think remaking Lilo & Stitch was a good idea? One assumes they did — too much work goes into these live-action Disney redos for anyone to make one against their will — but this new version exudes a palpable whiff of frustration. Dean Fleischer Camp’s picture is often ruthlessly faithful to Christopher Sanders and Dean DeBlois’s 2002 original, but its tone and spirit are all wrong — as if the filmmakers realized they had erred in attempting this remake and desperately looked to cover for it. And so, what was once a lazy, crazy, charming afternoon daydream of a movie is now a frantic, insistent, often unfunny sci-fi comedy. It might distract young children with its hyper, family-forward story line, but most of the magic has vanished.
The plot points remain pretty much intact, however. Stitch, a bizarre little experiment created by aliens in a more advanced corner of the universe, escapes from captivity and lands in Hawaii, on the remote water planet of “Eee-aawrth.” There, he pretends to be a dog and is adopted by irascible tyke Lilo Pelekai (Maia Kealoha), who lives with her overextended teenage sister Nani (Sydney Elizebeth Agudong). Their parents are dead, so Nani struggles to make ends meet and serve as a responsible guardian for Lilo in hopes of keeping child services at bay. The deranged Stitch (voiced by Sanders himself, who left Disney years ago but contractually still gets to do the voice of his most indelible creation) makes matters that much more difficult, especially since he’s now being pursued by the odd-couple alien duo of Agent Pleakley (Billy Magnussen) and Dr. Jumba (Zach Galifianakis), who have disguised themselves as humans but haven’t quite mastered the ways people walk and behave.
It’s a silly story, and it worked marvelously back in 2002 because it felt off the cuff, like a spontaneous burst of imagination and whimsy. That had a lot to do with its look. The original Lilo & Stitch was among Disney’s last hand-drawn animated features. At the time of its production, the company’s partnership with Pixar had already yielded several computer-animated megahits, such as Toy Story (1995) and A Bug’s Life (1998), and some executives wondered if Lilo & Stitch should also have been made in that snazzy and popular new format. But so much of the film’s wonder came from its animation style — from the rounded faces and figures of Sanders’s character designs; from the dreamy, painstakingly produced watercolor backgrounds (unseen in a Disney feature since the 1940s); from the way the whole movie, with its goofy blend of sci-fi, slapstick, and sentiment, seemed to unfold as if someone were making it up as they went along. To try and place this tale in a photorealistic world — either via live-action or computer graphics — would have been self-defeating.
And it is. And it feels at times like the filmmakers realized it somewhere along the way. So the new movie makes up for the original’s offhand poetry with speed and engineered rambunctiousness. This new Lilo & Stitch is fast and loud, and not in a particularly entertaining way. The picture plays at Stitch’s pace, every scene an exercise in chaos — which counterintuitively undoes this destroy-everything-in-sight teddy bear’s singularity. The soft edges of the animation and the languorous mood in the original contrasted with the creature’s antics, so we really felt the disruption; Stitch was like a joke the movie was playing on itself. That irreverence powered the narrative, and it also ensured that when things quieted down — when Stitch became part of Lilo’s family and achieved a sense of belonging — the emotional sobriety of the moment really hit us. It’s one of the reasons why Lilo & Stitch remains one of the few Mouse House efforts from the period following the Disney Renaissance to effectively jerk tears from even the most jaded of eyes.
As for this one … not so much. Which does come as a surprise, since director Camp’s previous feature was 2022’s Marcel the Shell With Shoes On, an adorable live-action and stop-motion hybrid with an effervescent sensibility not dissimilar to the first Lilo & Stitch. Both pictures felt like stray thoughts that drifted into unexpectedly moving climaxes. To give any movie the quality of a compelling doodle is hard enough, but to pull it off in animation, or in a film that incorporates animation (and thus requires tons of preparation and deliberation), is downright superhuman. We can see what made Camp an ideal match for this material.
Maybe the dutiful nature of this project was its undoing. Many scenes feel like they’ve been duplicated with near-perfect fidelity, right down to the composition of the shots. (There are also the requisite fan-friendly winks, including welcome cameos from original cast members Tia Carrere and Jason Scott Lee.) Unfortunately, the faithfulness highlights the singularity of the source and the soullessness of the copy. It reminds us that Lilo & Stitch’s form and its essence were one and the same. This remake doesn’t feel like its own movie, but rather a doomed attempt to reengineer a miracle.
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