Lilo & Stitch was a 2002 hand drawn animated film from Disney. It was about an alien who escaped capture from his people to land on wealth and become the pet if you went to a little girl in Hawaii. That’s the jist of the story. At this point, Disney animation was on the backside of its resonance of the 90s. Pixar had taken over as the king of the hill in animation, and hand drawn animation had taken a backseat to computer animation. This was a hit for them , but not as much as their 90s films. I don’t think anybody saw this getting the live action reboot treatment, but twenty-three years later, here we are.

The live action version of Lilo and Stitch veers off from its predecessor a little bit. One of the ways is the opening sequence, where Lilo escapes capture by the Intergalactic Federation of Planets and lands on earth. The animation sequence was much longer and more grand, while the remake’s sequence is more straightforward.  It gets the job done, though, and starts this film off and running with the right tone I was looking for. The Lilo (Maia Kealoha) sequences do the same. She’s a rambunctious little kid who likes to do things her own way. Her big sister and caregiver, Nani (Sydney Agudong), is frustrated by her behavior and has her own struggles. If anyone has seen the original movie, it has a lot of the same beats as the remake, so there is no need to explain too much of the plot or story beats.

Because the film is a live action remake, there is a mix of CGI and live action. Some characters are visually created. Such as the evil doctor Jumba Jookiba (Zach Galifianakis), Pleakley (Billy Magnussen) the leader of the Federation of Planets (Hannah Waddingham) and of course Stitch himself (Chris Sanders) who voiced the character in the original animated film. He’s also the director of The Wild Robot, which almost won the Best Animated Feature Academy Award at this past Oscars. He’s a very talented man.  The visual effects and motion capture work on the CGI characters is beautifully done. I didn’t think once how it didn’t look good because of how great it looked.  That was a worry of mine, that was for not.

As the original movie was animated, it was hard to judge the voice-over of the human characters in that version, but as they’re played by actual humans, now it’s easier to judge their performances.  Both Kealoha, as the little girl, and Agudong, as the big sister/legal guardian, are fantastic. This is the first time I’ve seen either of them in anything like this, and they brought the animated human characters to life. With Stitch being in all of the marketing, I was worried that the human characters were going to be overshadowed by the cuddly cute CGI alien pet. Which in the original film and here everybody thinks is a dog. That always made me laugh in both versions that I’ve seen.  The human characters were emotionally relevant and had me from the moment I saw them. I genuinely cared about what happened to the little girl and her big sister.  These actresses were a revelation to me as these characters. This film was emotionally manipulative if that’s something that can be said, but in a great way.

It’s hard to make a CGI character have depth and layers to him, but this movie lacks that where the animated film had it in spades. Stitch was a fully realized character with all the craziness and zaniness that I loved from the original film,  but there was a lack of connection to him that the original film showed. For instance, there was a whole subplot in the animated film about Mother Duck and her ducklings and so forth. How they eventually have to leave the nest and go out on their own. This movie tried to shoehorn that into a more relatable family dynamic instead. That was very emotional, as I mentioned earlier, but I would have like to have seen Stitch’s journey more discovering who he is and where he belongs.

The live action reboot had a number of action scenes that I loved, similar to the animated film and a new one, which was pretty cool as well. Stitch is a walking disaster, so he, of course, causes a lot of damage and wrecks things wherever he goes. A restaurant,  the house where the main characters live, and so forth. These were hilarious and well constructed scenes. The scene I loved the most was a surfing scene where the two sisters and Stitch go surfing.  This was set to cool music and the pair of aliens who were sent down to Earth to capture them get involved.  This was a beautiful sequence and showed a lot of quality from the director.  Part of why the animated film worked were all the fish out of water scenes and those work here as well. I loved every minute of them.

In a film like this, the villains can be one note or, as they say, mustache twirling.  Galifianakis and Magnussen weren’t the only villains in the movie, though. There were human villains played by Tia Carre and Courtney B Vance as a child protective services lady and a CIA agent. In the original, this one is just one character. Here, the director expands that character into two characters. I think it works better this way. I always thought that was a strange thing in the original animated film. Ving Rhame voiced that character, and he seemed a little out of place to me. These types of films need characters like this to help give the movie some emotional heft or make the audience care more. That is exactly what happened here, so it worked. Carre and B Vance were fine, not great, the same as Rhames in the original.

I came to Lilo & Stitch a little later than most probably did. I’m not as much into animated films as others, but when they’re down right, I’m all on board for them. The animated version of this was pretty good, but the live action version was arguably much better from my humble perspective. Whereas animation can create a genuine emotion in the audience that watches them live action can pull at the heartstrings more. Disney has made more than a few live action remakes of their classic 2D animated films, and more often than not, they haven’t worked because they didn’t have the emotional heft this one had. As a brother with siblings, I have cared more about them as I got older because they are my family and as the saying goes “Ohana Means Family” and family sticks together.  This film proved that in spades. I honestly cared about the relationship between these sisters and Stitch. It was an added bonus for me as an animal lover. That’s what I think of Stitch when I see him in the movie. I hope that doesn’t come across the wrong way, but that’s how I felt watching the film. I absolutely loved it despite how I came away feeling. It’s going to pull on every emotion viewers have in a good way. That’s what movies are for.

4 stars

Dan Skip Allen