[COLUMN] What the Lilo & Stitch Remake Doesn't Understand About the Original | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece includes discussions of adaptational changes between the original Lilo & Stitch and the remake. This includes a discussion of the third act and the ending.

The live action remake of Lilo & Stitch is a huge financial success for Disney. As with the impressive box office haul for Moana 2, the film’s performance is especially notable because it was originally intended as a streaming release.

As with most of these ostensibly “live action” adaptations, Lilo & Stitch exists in the uncanny valley. The production makes the smart decision to retain Stitch’s cartoon-like qualities, such as his big emotive eyes or contempt for the law of conservation of mass. However, allowing for the film’s expressive animated protagonist, it’s hard not to feel that something more fundamental has been lost in the transition from one medium to another.

The animated Lilo & Stitch was released in June 2002. It was a troubled time for Disney as an animation powerhouse. The Disney Renaissance was well and truly over. The studio’s more austere efforts like Tarzan fell flat, while its more successful releases like The Emperor’s New Groove were the result of chaos behind the scenes. Neither audiences nor critics were especially enthusiastic about the studio’s efforts to appeal to young boys with Atlantis: The Lost Empire or Treasure Planet.

The success of films like Toy Story or Shrek suggested that the future of animation lay in computer-generated imagery and that hand-drawn animation was a thing of the past. Indeed, Disney had already tried its hand at a computer-generated cartoon with Dinosaur, another turn-of-the-millennium misfire. The studio would lean even harder into computer-generated animation in the years ahead with movies like Chicken Little or Meet the Robertsons.

Against that backdrop, nobody was really paying attention to Lilo & Stitch, a quirky animated film from directors Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois, who had collaborated on Mulan. In fact, Lilo & Stitch had originally been conceived as a project to keep the studio’s satellite animation studio in Florida open following the completion of Mulan. Disney would close the Orlando-based studio in January 2004, after the cancellation of the planned feature film A Few Good Ghosts.

Sanders was thrilled to be working on Lilo & Stitch in Florida, far away from the company’s Los Angeles headquarters. “That studio was like what Disney studios was back in the ’30s, back in the ’40s — young artists who were hungry, who were driven, who wanted to prove themselves and who were immensely talented,” Sanders reflected two decades after the film’s release. Lilo & Stitch was the work of talented creators at the margins of the Disney corporate hierarchy.

Sanders credits President of Disney Feature Animation, Tom Schumacher, for protecting Lilo & Stitch, deflecting the potential scrutiny of Disney Chief Executive Officer Michael Eisner. “That’s why the movie was like it was,” Sanders has explained, “because Thomas Schumacher wanted it to look like I made it, and he hid it from the studio so that it would remain that quirky little film that it was supposed to be.” Schumacher encouraged Sanders to animate the film in his own distinct style.

Interviews with the production team make it sound like Lilo & Stitch was a covert subversive action within Disney. The team was under-resourced and had to cut corners. “We had to reduce line mileage you know,” Dean DeBlois has stated, “delete pockets off jean shorts or prints off t-shirts or reduce complexity wherever we had to in order to get there. We couldn’t afford shadows, so we put our characters under the shade of trees and things like that throughout the movie.”

The result is a beautiful animated film, and that underdog outcast spirit bleeds into the narrative. Both young Lilo (Daveigh Chase) and extraterrestrial Stitch (Sanders) are outsiders who don’t fit in, and who face the prospect of punishment for refusing to conform to society’s expectations. Social worker Cobra Bubbles (Ving Rhames) threatens to take Lilo away from her sister Nani (Tia Carrere), while Captain Gantu (Kevin Michael Richardson) hunts down exiled lab specimen Stitch.

Lilo & Stitch felt like a breath of fresh air, an unexpected bolt from the blue. Much of the advertising campaign for the animated Lilo & Stitch served to set Stitch apart from other classic Disney cartoons like Beauty & the Beast or The Lion King. While this was obviously a very savvy piece of marketing, it captured the anarchic energy of Lilo & Stitch. This was a different sort of film, about a different sort of character, produced in a different sort of way, at time when Disney needed that sort of reset.

As such, it’s hard not to feel cynical about the live action remake of Lilo & Stitch. Indeed, DeBlois himself dismissed these sorts of remakes as “lazy”  back in June 2020, although one imagines that DeBlois’ opinion might have shifted slightly given he’s now directing this year’s other big “live action” reimagining of a Sanders and DeBlois classic, How to Train Your Dragon. In fact, DeBlois is seemingly so committed to this model that he is already working on a “live action” How to Train Your Dragon 2.

The original animated Lilo & Stitch felt a little bold and transgressive, a slightly subversive and personal work that had somehow managed to sneak its way through the production machinery of one of the largest entertainment conglomerates on the planet. In contrast, the “live action” reimaging of Lilo & Stitch is exactly like every other one of these assemble-line adaptations, from Beauty and the Beast to The Lion King to Snow White.

Stitch is no longer a scrappy little outsider attacking the larger Disney canon. Stitch is such a beloved icon that he is part of the Disney canon. Having Stitch rip apart a marketing billboard for Thunderbolts* doesn’t feel transgressive in the same way that putting him in the frame with Belle (Paige O’Hara) did two decades ago, because this is just how movies are sold now. After all, the live action Lilo & Stitch seems likely to handily out-gross Thunderbolts*.

It is certainly too much to suggest that any Disney cartoon could be meaningfully anti-establishment, but Stitch has become so familiar and so successful that he is the establishment. Stitch’s crossover appearances are no more subversive than having Loki (Tom Hiddleston) appear in The Simpsons. At this point, it is just brand synergy. Anything special, personal or meaningful about the original film has been washed away in the urge to wring any remaining financial value from the brand.

While this remake of Lilo & Stitch is largely faithful to the original animated film, this cynicism bleeds through into some of the adaptational choices. Many of the original film’s rough edges have been carefully sanded down. There is a somewhat grim recurring punchline in the animated film about the effect of tourism on Hawaii, but that thread is completely excised from the adaptation, presumably because it might risk making some audience members uncomfortable.

However, it is also worth noting the characters who are added and removed from the adaptation. The remake completely drops Captain Gantu, the trigger-happy interstellar law enforcement official who effectively serves as the antagonist of the animated film. It is a weird choice, particularly if the audience is asked to understand Stitch as an extraterrestrial fugitive. Of course Stitch’s adversary should be a galactic policeman.

Director Dean Fleischer Camp has argued that the deletion of Gantu was part of the “deepening” of the movie, replacing him with a reworked version of mad scientist Jumba (Zach Galifianakis). “One of the things I loved about the original is that up until Gantu arrives, there is no villain that is just a villain,” Fleischer Camp argued. “Gantu arrives and it turns into a more conventional movie. I thought there was a nice opportunity here for [Jumba] to turn and become the villain in the third act.”

This argument is unconvincing. After all, turning Jumba into the villain creates exactly the same issue that Fleischer Camp pointed to as justification for getting rid of Gantu. In the third act of the movie, there is still the introduction of a villain “that is just a villain.” It’s just that the character in that role has changed from an alien policeman to a mad scientist. It doesn’t solve the problem that Fleischer Camp identifies, and it makes Jumba a much less interesting character.

Depending on how cynical one feels, it’s possible to speculate on why that change might have been made. Disney is in the middle of cultural retrenchment, a series of craven appeals to the culture war pundits which has led to the erasure of trans characters and queer perspectives from their films. In this context, it makes sense that Disney would decide to erase a less-than-flattering portrayal of law enforcement in a pandering concession to right-wing paranoia.

While the remake completely deletes Captain Gantu, it adds an entirely new character. Cobra Bubbles (Courtney B. Vance) is no longer a social worker, but a CIA operative. The social worker who deals with Nani (Sydney Elizebeth Agudong) and Lilo (Maia Kealoha) is now Kekoa (Tia Carrere). Kekoa is presented as a much less antagonistic force. She is kinder, gentler and more reasonable. If Bubbles was an iron fist, Kekoa is a velvet glove. She is the polite and friendly face of state authority.

Indeed, the live action remake of Lilo & Stitch ends with the state taking custody of Lilo, separating her from Nani. This is framed as a happy ending; Lilo is rehoused with their neighbor, Tūtū (Amy Hill), so that Nani can go to college. Still, it feels like a betrayal of the film’s premise that the state should have to step in. The animated Lilo & Stitch is about the importance of holding together in the face of outside authorities trying to pull a family apart. The remake is about surrendering to them.

These are all subtle changes, but they start to build up over the course of the film’s runtime. In both its narrative and its production, the original Lilo & Stitch was a story of unlikely outsiders carving out a place for themselves separate from the larger forces at work. The remake is the exact opposite. Stitch has been well and truly domesticated.