Disney, having already run through live-action remakes of all of its 1990s animated classics, has now moved into the next decade with a re-do of Lilo & Stitch, the 2002 non-musical animated film about an orphaned Hawaiian girl, her chaotic but cute blue alien friend, and their mutual love of the music of Elvis Presley.
The original Lilo & Stitch, while not part of Disney’s animated golden age, was a fairly big hit, and it spawned a sequel called Lilo & Stitch 2: Stitch Has a Glitch and a subsequent Disney Channel series, neither of which I’ve seen. The remake, directed by Marcel the Shell With Shoes On’s Dean Fleischer-Camp, is mostly faithful in bringing this story into the live-action world, although “live action” is something of a misnomer since Stitch and the other alien characters remain computer-generated.
The world-building is decent, and there are some effective emotional beats. But this story doesn’t work in the “real” world, for a wide variety of reasons. Stitch was a character created and voiced by Chris Sanders, who co-directed the 2002 movie and returns here as the voice. A chaos agent created by an alien mad scientist, Stitch is ordered into exile and is sent, Kal-el-style, in a tiny spaceship towards Earth.
Landing in Hawaii, he’s soon befriended by six-year-old Lilo (Maia Kealoha), who’s being raised by her college-aged sister (Sydney Elizebeth Agudong) after the death of their parents. Bullied and friendless, Lilo soon befriends the newly-arrived alien, in a plot that follows many of the same beats of Spielberg’s E.T.
The friends find themselves under siege from the aliens, one the mad scientist and the other an “Earth expert,” who appear in human form as Zach Galifianakis and Billy Magnussen. There’s also a social worker (Tia Carrere, who did a voice in the first movie) threatening to break up the sisters, and a CIA agent (Courtney B. Vance) investigating the arrival of aliens. But standing up against them is the power of family, and see if you can guess which one prevails.
There’s some emotionally effective material involving the sisters and the Lilo/Stitch bond, but overall, there are a lot of reasons why this story doesn’t translate to the live-action world. Lilo keeps introducing Stitch as her “dog,” but he doesn’t look or act like a dog (he talks). Also, early in the movie, Stitch crashes a wedding, is photographed, and featured on the news, leading to no follow-up. Did someone use the neuralizer from Men in Black on the characters, except off-screen?
William Goldman once pointed out that all the early Pixar movies ended with all the characters taking turns rescuing each other; that happens here, as well. The two aliens-as-humans start uncomfortably wearing human skin in the tradition of Vincent D’Onofrio in Men in Black, something with comic potential, but this conceit is dropped after about five minutes. And no one in the real world should have as ridiculous a name as “Cobra Bubbles,” which in the cartoon was the social worker but has been shifted to the CIA agent character.
I liked a few touches, including the continuation of the Elvis references. Also, everything involving the alien race is an elaborate homage to the Star Wars prequels, which arrived around the same time as the animated original. There’s even a “Galactic Senate” that looks just like the one in The Phantom Menace.
After the flop of Snow White earlier this spring, Disney is likely done with these live-action remakes of its old intellectual property. Lilo & Stitch has its moments, but it’s not going to be the movie that rescues that concept.