A small blue alien makes a half-hearted attempt at destruction as the soul comes out of a beloved animated film. Here’s our Lilo & Stitch review.
What do we owe the next generation? It might be a grand question for a review of Disney’s new ‘naughty blue alien’ movie – the latest in the company’s long line of live action remakes – but it’s one I’ve found tricky to shake since I saw Lilo & Stitch at a packed family screening last weekend. Clean water feels like a good start; trees and a minimally irradiated atmosphere would be pleasant surprises.
In a less physically demanding sense, though, we tend to forget it’s a grown-up’s job to tell young ‘uns stories. Kids are notoriously bad at this, you see, and though they might have some instinctive understanding of narrative structure, it’s traditionally been their elders’ job to entertain them between shifts setting fire to the oceans and starting fights in comment sections. It’s perfectly possible to take this job seriously; all too often, we don’t. “It’s just a kids’ movie”, we say, accepting our kids’ placation over genuine entertainment.
The original Lilo & Stitch took its job seriously. Produced off the back of a Disney animated golden age by a baby media conglomerate worth just $33.3bn, the tale of a young girl and her destructive blue friend was a small film which inadvertently gave the company one of its most profitable IPs. Now, the studio is returning to keep its theme parks stocked with little blue merchandise. This task, it seems to be taking very seriously; storytelling, it does not.
The story of 2025’s remake is broadly similar to its predecessor. Lilo (Maia Kealoha) and her grown-up sister, Nani (Sydney Elizebeth Agudong) live on a Hawaiian island, their parents out of the picture. Nani struggles to pay rent; Lilo’s behavioural issues have social services peeping through the windows; and an experimental six-limbed koala has landed in the local dog pound. A pair of aliens (Zach Galifianakis and Billy Magnussen) are sent to retrieve “Experiment 626” before he starts on the path of destruction he was bred to create.
An almost Ghibli-esque story of found families and the different faces of love, original writer-directors Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois packed their 2002 family animation with narrative nuances and uncomfortable truths. Lilo’s relationship with her sister is fraught, often alarmingly so, and unconditionally loving despite itself. Stitch is a genuinely dangerous psychopath trapped in the body of a toothy blue fuzzball. Lilo is something of a social outcast by dint of being a genuinely odd duck.
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23 years on from the original, though, and The Walt Disney Company is a very different beast. The golden age of pre-Pixar animation is a distant memory. Walt Disney Pictures’ new business model demands guaranteed hits – and big ones. Lilo & Stitch, like the rest of its already-adapted back catalogue, worked once, in the way mid-budget animated movies were once allowed to work without breaking box office records.
Why wouldn’t it again?
So begins the familiar process of taking a beloved movie and carving out its soul. Disney, now with both feet firmly buried in the blockbuster business, has no time for small stories, and so everything in Lilo & Stitch is bigger and simpler. No longer is Nani a struggling minimum-wage employee just trying to keep her broken family together; she’s now a former trophy-winning surfer and a genius, giving up a marine biology scholarship to care for her six-year-old sister.
The pair’s relationship deteriorates to the point of pleading-at-a-locked door and no further, all the edges of genuine frustration and heartache duly filed off. The quiet beaches and cafes of the original are replaced with a Hawaii at the height of tourist season. In an opposite, if more focus group-friendly direction, Experiment “born for destruction” 626 spends his first moments on Earth naughtily chasing down a yummy wedding cake. Bad Stitch.
The smoothing exercise doesn’t end there. What was once a hilariously CIA-ish social worker is now introduced as an operative from the off, handily avoiding any level of confusion or narrative intrigue. The fate of Lilo and Nina’s parents is exposited in their first few minutes on screen. Each joke – all lifted wholesale from the original script – is clarified either before or after it’s told so that no one is left wondering if they were supposed to be laughing or not. The whole film feels like a dumbing down of a children’s movie by adults who view the original, and their new audience, with utter contempt.
This would be bad enough if anyone at any stage in its production had asked if the result would prove entertaining to children. Instead, the filmmakers refuse even to choose between placation and entertainment, swinging for lazy, marketable mundanity. Every snappily edited moment feels focus-grouped to the point of incoherence, jokes and plot points are over-explained and softened to a lethal degree, and Stitch isn’t even given enough to do to turn the end result into an effective piece of merchandise marketing.
If the muted response from a room of six-year-olds at this weekend screening is indicative of how the film will be received internationally, Disney might have achieved the impossible and made a Stitch film which won’t persuade kids to buy a cuddly Stitch.
What we’re left with instead is the cynical aftertaste of a viral marketing campaign; a film which exists to put its poster on the side of a bus and persuade a million kids they need a new lunchbox, ideally before they’re taken to the cinema, and which can’t even be bothered to hide it by telling a story at the same time.
Director Dean Fleischer Camp’s Marcel The Shell With Shoes On was one of the most charming, soulful films of 2021, a fact which only serves to highlight the gaping void where Lilo & Stitch's heart should be. Any attempt at introducing new ideas to the source material has been obliterated with a plasma cannon, leaving a perfectly adequate cast floundering to eke anything of substance from a script which sees the 2002 film as an impenetrably difficult text.
This is that film as half-remembered by an Excel spreadsheet; a mess of poorly lit exposition which takes the animated original and carves out all unnecessary charm to appeal to an audience with the taste of a 17th century Puritan; a film that’ll leave an army of surprisingly bored kids in its wake and take an inexplicable 20 additional minutes to do so compared to its source material. This is not “just a kids’ movie” – it’s so much less.
Stitch, on the other hand, remains very cute, and I’m sure the bus ads will sell a lot of toys. To turn one of Disney’s biggest merchandising IP into a mega hit, the company needed to do the bare minimum.
Mission accomplished?
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