Link to the audio version of this post is HERE
[I was deeply saddened to hear of the untimely passing of Daveigh Chase, the voice of Lilo in the animated film. She brought to life a beloved character for an entire generation and she will be sorely missed.]
We’re back in Rebootland, this time on Live Action Remake Street, for a trip to Hawaii, a place of intense natural beauty and perpetual summer. Now, readers, I was lucky enough to have vacationed in Hawaii once and it was truly magical. I don’t think my blood pressure has ever been lower than when I sat on my lanai reading a book and listening to the waves lapping at the beach below. But to be fair, I wasn’t an illegal alien experiment that just made an intergalactic escape from my own execution. I mean, the TSA is bad, but it’s not that bad. Let’s get into the live action remake of Lilo & Stitch.
Smarter than an average bear and with more arms, too
Now, I know what you’re thinking; we just watched as Moana’s live action remake crashed and burned with critics and audiences alike, so why are we talking about another Disney live action remake? Sure, I could go see Moana, but the schadenfreude of criticizing that isn’t worth sitting through Dwayne Johnson’s singing again. You know I’m quite the cynic about these sorts of things, so I did drag my heels on checking Lilo & Stitch out again, even though I really do like Stitch. I mean, I keep a LEGO set of him sitting on my coffee table as I write this. I’m a fan even though I didn’t watch the movie as a kid; I only saw it for the first time a few years ago. I’m not going to pretend that live action remakes of animated films aren’t a nostalgia-themed cash grab for a property that already exists in a relatively timeless medium, but I do think there’s a fundamental difference between a movie like Lilo & Stitch, which came out in 2002, nearly a quarter century ago, and Moana, which came out about half an hour ago. There are certainly ways to justify the Stitch remake from more than a business perspective, but I think the best justification for the thing to exist is the thing itself, Of course, if you’ve seen the animated film, then very little here is going to be new, but sometimes a cover song can be better than the original, so it’s worth getting into it to find out whether Stitch is Jimi Hendrix’s “All Along the Watchtower” or if it’s the How to Train Your Dragon live action remake (I don’t even know what to call the Lion King remake; best forgotten altogether, I imagine). Luckily, Lilo & Stitch is such a strong animated film that it translates well into live action.
It’s Disney, so of course we start off with some dead parents. Lilo and her college-aged sister Nani are left orphaned and struggling when their parents suddenly pass away. And I mean struggling in every sense of the word. I’d say Nani can barely make ends meet, but I think that’s being pretty generous to the stack of unpaid bills she has piling up. And Lilo is having a very hard time, which you expect of a child who just lost their parents. What doesn’t help is that the kids around her are pretty terrible; Lilo has no friends and the girls in her age group ridicule and tease her mercilessly, to the point that Lilo lashes out. This is the first difference I spotted between the two movies and this, I think, was a good one. Lilo shoves a mean girl in her dance class pretty hard and she takes a rather nasty fall as the camera cuts away. By comparison, the animated film here is much more violent, with Lilo pinning the poor girl before pummeling her with her fists. Look, kids get into fistfights all the time (I was in more than my fair share, growing up as the only brown kid in an overwhelmingly white area), but I think it’s fine if that’s something that doesn’t make the final cut of a kids’ movie. Lilo, played by youngster Maia Kealoha, feels so much like the character in the animated movie that she embodied Lilo in a way I wasn’t expecting. I watched the two movies not too far apart in time and I think she did a great job.
Apparently this decision faced backlash, but I thought it was a great update for the film’s setting
Nani, Lilo’s overworked, overstressed, and in-over-her-head sister, played by relative newcomer Sydney Agudong, is doing the best she can and Agudong does very well portraying the perpetually exasperated Nani. Tia Carrere (Wayne’s World, True Lies), the original voice of Nani, is back and this time playing Mrs. Kekoa, the CPS officer who is, legitimately, trying to look out for Lilo and Nani’s best interests. Unfortunately that takes the form of Nani relinquishing custody of Lilo, which Nani is desperate to avoid. The two biggest swings I think they took with the casting here were Billy Magnussen (Game Night, No Time to Die) as Pleakley, the alien Earth-fanboy tasked to retrieve Stitch and Zach Galifianakis (The Hangover, Bob’s Burgers) as Jumba, the mad scientist who created Stitch in the first place and now must capture him alongside Pleakley. And frankly, they tore the leather off it with this move. Even the change to having them take human form instead of just donning disguises was a big choice to make and I think it worked really well. In addition to that, the extra runtime on the live action gives us a little more time with Pleakley and Jumba and the comedy dynamic between Magnussen and Galifianakis is great. Most of the laugh out loud moments I had in the film came from the two of them fumbling around, with Pleakley trying his best to remain unseen by human eyes and Jumba not really caring about being seen, taking Stitch alive, collateral damage, etc.
Zero thoughts, all vibes. And I’m okay with that
Courtney B. Vance (The Hunt for Red October), is a fantastic actor and I think he manages the role of Cobra Bubbles well enough, but I can’t help feeling that he’s a bit miscast. Bubbles was an imposing, intimidating Ving Rhames-like presence, voiced by Ving Rhames, and Vance never seems able to match that screen presence. There’s nothing technically wrong with his performance, but whenever the animated Bubbles showed up, there was a sense of apprehension relieved by the juxtaposition of his silly name. Vance, more often than not, looks like a guy who’s grumpy because his Hawaiian vacation got cut short by work. My dream casting for this would be Brian Tyree Henry (Atlanta), but I also admit to wanting to see Paper Boi cast in everything. Rounding out the cast is Amy Hill (returning from the original again in a different role) as Tutu and Kaipo Dudoit as lovable-surfer-dude-with-a-crush-on-Nani David. Hannah Waddingham (Ted Lasso, The Fall Guy) also lends her voice to the film as the Grand Councilwoman of the Galactic Federation.
That’s no dog, it’s the Death Star! And he’s cute as a damn button
Now on to the big blue guy. Well, the little blue guy. Experiment 626 himself, the cute, fuzzy ball of destruction called Stitch. Now trapped in Hawaii because water causes his density to increase to levels that would drag him to the bottom of the ocean and it happens to surround this picturesque island, Stitch is distraught. Chris Sanders returns to voice the titular alien and with as much time has passed, he sounds absolutely perfect as Stitch still. And I have to say, the move to 3D CGI in a real world space hasn’t harmed the cuteness at all. Disney really learned from the initial disaster that was Sonic the Hedgehog when he was first revealed and definitely made sure to get it right the first time so they didn’t face the same kind of backlash. Just like Kealoha embodies Lilo, this Stitch just looks and feels like Stitch to me, with little to no interpretation or gap filling needed. The new Stitch model looks incredibly faithful to the animated film and blends reasonably well into the real world setting. And he’s as rude and violent and troublesome as you remember. If there’s something to break or a mess to make, he’s ready to do it. I mean, he was bred for destruction as an invincible killing machine, so by comparison, spraying a kid with a soda gun isn’t exactly the end of the world. But adults don’t like that and he does cause a small, minor, largely inconsequential inferno and really puts Nani in dire straits when it comes to keeping custody of Lilo.
Soda gun coming as paid DLC to Call of Duty any day now, I’m sure
These are two deeply wounded kids. I’m not sure the children in the audience are equipped to understand the amount of pain Lilo and Nani are going through, but I am. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, the strings are cut and they’re on their own. It wasn’t the plan, that’s for sure. And their struggle is the struggle of a lot of people; they’re trying to get by and stay together. Then pops in this blue ball of terror and everything changes. Lilo immediately identifies with Stitch because she’s been labeled a problem child as well, even though she’s just a kid coping with something she should never have had to. Other people lose their parents and become Batman, people deal with grief differently and you can’t expect a small child to have the tools to process this easily. Their brains are the size of a walnut, as I said last week. Watching Lilo struggle with the idea of being bad, of being written off by the people around her who don’t take the time to understand her struggles or can’t find empathy for a little girl who suddenly finds herself orphaned, is absolutely heartbreaking. But seeing her come to the realization that she’s not bad just because she gets into trouble is very touching. No one is perfect, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t deserving of love or empathy. And she takes this lesson and imparts it to Stitch when he wonders if he’s just bad to the core. I admit that even watching this azure furball struggle to reconcile his nature was similarly heartbreaking, which I think speaks to the strength of not only Lilo & Stitch’s narrative that was laid out in the original film, but also how well this remake was executed. It would have been so easy for it to fall flat and feel like a hollow exercise in cashing in on nostalgia. But care was put into this movie and it shows.
I know live action remakes are a hard sell. As much as I did enjoy this movie, I’m dealing with the feeling that this movie didn’t need to exist. There are enough changes to the film that it feels pretty much mostly like its own thing, while still telling largely the same story, so it still begs the question. What is the point of the remake? It’s still hard to say in any phrase that doesn’t mention a business justification, but there’s something about this movie that makes me not mind that it’s a remake. At the end of the day, I loved this movie because I loved the original and this does it justice. Did it need to be made? No. If you’ve seen and loved the original, do you need to see this one? No. But there’s a lot of really wonderful stuff here, regardless of the fact that it’s wonderful because the original is wonderful. Maia Kealoha puts in a moving performance as Lilo and that’s worth seeing, even if the movie doesn’t really do anything new. What Lilo & Stitch does do is a lot like what the original does; it’s a testament to the power of nurture in the push-pull with nature. Stitch was designed to be evil, to be a monster. But it was the love and kindness of Lilo, declaring him part of their ohana and fighting for him to be a part of their family that changed him. The movie still shows how powerful caring can be and tells a beautiful story of found family and acceptance of people as they are, however imperfect they may be. This is where the movie really shines; Stitch describes the family as little and broken, and doesn’t that just feel universal? Whose family is perfect? Who hasn’t had to weather hardship and who hasn’t been changed by it? But here’s this movie saying that no matter what happens, if people stand by each other, they can get through it and that no one deserves to be thrown away. And remake or not, that’s a pretty timeless message. It may not be the lightest of light summer fun, but it’s a great film for adults and children alike, as is the original. Lilo & Stitch is rated PG, has a runtime of 1 hour, 48 minutes, and streams on Disney+.
