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Lilo and Stitch is an extremely good children's movie. I've been working at a daycare for over five years now, and out of all the children's movies I've shown to an auidence of twenty or so school-age kids (i.e. between the ages of 5 and 12), the only movie that's held their attention as well as Lilo and Stitch is The Emperor's New Groove, and the only one that's held it better is An American Tail. Of those three, Lilo and Stitch has won the vote of "what movie we will watch" the most. It not only entertains kids, but emotionally captivates them from start to finish, because it very thoroughly understands how to engage children on their level. It's a smart, tightly written children's movie.

The feat of story-telling genius it pulls of lies in its ability to reach both where children's imaginations want to go and where their lived real-world experiences lie - most children's movies focus on one or the other, but Lilo and Stitch dives deep into both. On the imagination side, there's Stitch's whole plotline of being a little alien monster being chased by other weirdo aliens onto earth because they want to stop him from running amok and causing havoc (which, of course, happens anyway in fun cartoony comedy/action spectacle). On the real-world side, you have Lilo's plotline of being a troubled little girl who has an abundance of very real problems that, like an actual child, she struggles to comprehend and deal with, as well as the many adults in her life that care about her to some degree but all struggle to fully understand her. Kids want to be Stitch and run amok and cause cartoony havoc. Kids, even the least-troubled kids, relate to Lilo, because all of them have been in a similar situation as her at least once in their lives.

Balancing these two very different stories, with very different tones and scopes to their respective conflicts, is a hard writing task, but Lilo and Stitch manages to do it in a way that seems effortless with one very powerful trick. The two plots are direct mirrors to each other, complete with the characters involved in each having foils in the respective plot. To break it down:

Stitch, the wild and destructive alien gremlin who everyone has labeled as a crime against existence, is Lilo, the troubled young girl who's viewed as a "problem child" by all the adults in her life. In both plotlines, Stitch and Lilo are facing the threat of being "taken away" from the life they know because they act out, and in both plotlines, we see that this is an unfathomably cruel thing to do to them and will not actually solve the problems they have.

Dr. Jumbaa, the mad scientist who made Stitch because making monsters is what mad scientists do, and who had no intentions of ever being nurturing or parental to anything or anyone in his life, is Nani, Lilo's older sister whose parents died when she was young and now is forced to act as a parental substitute despite not being mentally or emotionally prepared for that responsibility yet. Both Dr. Jumbaa and Nani are trying to get their respective wild children in line with what society wants them to be, and both are struggling hard with it because they in turn have a lot of growing to do before they can actually accomplish that.

Pleakley, the nebbish alien bureaucrat who ends up being assigned to help Dr. Jumbaa despite being mostly uninvolved in creating the whole Stitch situation, is David, the nice but mostly ineffectual guy who's crushing on Nani and wants to help her but doesn't really have much he can provide except emotional support. Ultimately Pleakley and David prove that said emotional support is a lot more helpful than it seems on the surface, as they give Jumbaa and Nani respectively a lot of the pushes they need to become better in their parental roles.

The Grand Councilwoman, who runs the society of aliens that is trying to banish Stitch forever for his crime of existing, is Cobra Bubbles, the Child Protective Services agent who is in charge of deciding whether or not Lilo needs to be taken away from her home forever for, ostensibly, her own good. Both are well-intentioned and stern, with a desire to follow the rules of society and do what procedure says is the most humane thing to do in this situation, but both lack the understanding of Stitch/Lilo's situation to actually help until the end of the movie.

Finally, we have Captain Gantu, the enforcer of the Galactic Council who is a mean, aggressive, sadistic brute but is viewed as a "good guy" by society because he plays by its rules (well, when he knows can't get away with breaking them, anyway), who is the counterpart of Myrtle, the mean, aggressive, sadistic schoolyard bully who is viewed as a "good kid" by other adults because she plays by the rules they established (well, when she knows she can't get away with breaking them, anyway). Both Gantu and Myrtle are, in truth, much nastier in temperament than Stitch and Lilo, but are better at hiding it in front of others and so get away with it, and often make Stitch and Lilo look worse in the eyes of others by provoking them to violence and then playing the victim about it - in fact, both even have the same line, "Does this look infected to you?", which they say after goading their respective wild-child victims into biting them.

The symmetry of these two plotlines allows them to actually feed into each other and build each other up instead of fighting each other for screentime. The fantastical nature of Stitch's plot adds whimsy to the far more realistic problems that Lilo faces so they don't get too heavy for the children in the audience, while the very real struggles of Lilo in her plotline bleed over into Stitch's plot and make both very emotionally poignant. When both plotlines hit their shared climax, they reach children on a emotional level few other movies can match - the terror of Lilo being taken away from her family, and the emotional complexity of that problem (Cobra Bubbles pointing to Lilo's ruined house and shouting at Nani, "IS THIS WHAT LILO NEEDS?" is so starkly real and heart-breaking), is matched and echoed in the visual splendor and mania of the spectacular no-way-this-is-going-to-work chase scene where Stitch, Nani, Jumbaa, and Pleakley all team up to rescue Lilo from Gantu.

The arcs of the characters all more or less line up. Nani confronts her own failures to be a guardian and parent to Lilo and resolves to do better and learn from her mistakes. Jumbaa, who through most of the movie protests to be evil and uncaring, nonetheless comes to not only care for Pleakley, but more importantly for Stitch too, and ends up assuming the role he never wanted but nonetheless forced himself into from the start: he is Stitch's family. Hell, the moment that reveals this is really clever - Stitch goes out into the wilderness to try and re-enact a scene from a storybook of The Ugly Duckling, hoping, in a very childish way, that his family will show up and love him. Jumbaa arrives and, coldly but not particularly cruelly, tells Stitch that he has no family - that Stitch wasn't born, but created in a lab by Jumbaa himself. But in that moment Jumbaa is proving himself wrong - because Stitch's creator, his parent, DID show up, and did exactly what happens in the story by telling Stitch the truth of what he is. It can't be a surprise, then, that later in the movie Jumbaa ends up deciding to side with Stitch, to help him save Lilo, and to stay on Earth with his child.

David and Pleakley go from being pushed away by Nani and Jumbaa respectively to essentially becoming their partners in the family. The Grand Councilwoman and Cobra Bubbles finally see how cruel their initial solution of isolating Stitch and Lilo from their family would be, and bend the rules they are supposed to enforce to protect and support this weird found family instead of breaking it apart. Gantu and Myrtle are recognized for the assholes they are and face comeuppance in the form of comedic slapstick pratfalls. And most importantly, Stitch and Lilo both get the emotional support and understanding they need to thrive and live happy lives as children should be allowed to do. It's like poetry, it rhymes.

It's a very precise, smartly written movie. It's a delicate balancing act of tone and emotions, with a very strong theme about the need for family and understanding that hits children in their hearts and imaginations. It's extremely well structured.

...

I would argue that this is, in fact, the point of that resolution. I think you're supposed to look at Lilo and Nani's situation, see how cruel and horrible the real world solution of "tear these two sisters away from each other for their own supposed good" is, and then sit there and think, "Well, surely it shouldn't take the miraculous intervention of fictional aliens to solve this issue in real life." Why can't, like, real humans do that work? Why couldn't the U.S. government better fund social workers so they could keep these small families together, why can't communities band together around those who are suffering the way these fictional aliens banded together for Lilo and Nani? Why is the solution presented here, which CAN be done by humans, only feasible to us in a fictional world full of whimsical aliens?

Lilo and Nani's happy ending requiring the intervention of fantastical made up beings isn't a flaw, it's a crucial feature. It's the point.

Because there is no world in which the "solution" that real life would offer - i.e. Nani losing custody of Lilo and, at best, visiting her occasionally - is a happy ending. The movie establishes so, so clearly that the vast majority of Lilo's problems are a result of fear of rejection and abandonment. Her parents are dead, she will never see them again. The kids at school treat her like a rabid dog. Other adults treat her with well-intentioned condescension at best and visible anxiety at worst. Only Nani loves her unconditionally (well, and Stitch too eventually), and in fact Nani is the only one who actively fights to keep Lilo around. You think that kid's behavior is going to improve from having the government step in and say, "Nah, you can't have your sister in your life the way you used to. She has to leave you." Fuck no, dude! Her trauma's just going to get worse, and the bad behaviors she has a result of it are going to get more extreme!

I feel stupid for even having to write that out - the movie cannot make it more plain and obvious how bad of an idea it is to separate Nani and Lilo, how cruel it is, how it does nothing to solve the real problems these girls face, and how it's ignoring what they both need, which is support from their community, not isolation from it. The movie is not subtle about this! It is in fact very, very blunt about the need for a big community - AN OHANA, if you will!

So, again, it'd be REALLY, UNFATHOMABLY STUPID to adapt this story and, say, decide to end it with Nani losing custody of Lilo so she can live on her own! Kind of unthinkably cruel too! Just really bad story telling! I don't know how dumb and inhuman you'd have to be yourself to want to change the story that way!

Just one more thing and I'll get out of your hair.

I can to some degree understand the corporate executive logic in wanting to fuck with Nani's role in the narrative. If you are looking at the original with a completely shallow and performative idea of feminism, then it does seem on the surface like Nani's role needs to be rewritten. "This 18 year old woman is giving up her future to raise a child? That's not very hashtag-girlboss-feminism of her! A 21st century woman needs a career, not a baby! How else can she show that's she's more than just a woman? "

But, like, there is nothing wrong with a woman, fictional or otherwise, choosing to be a parent. It's true that feminist literary theory often critiques stories where the women's arcs end with them getting married and having babies, but what this shallow Disney Live Action Feminism misses about that critique is that having kids isn't inherently the problem - it's the assumption that all women want nothing in life except to be mothers by a lot of fiction that raises people's hackles. Like, think of 90% of the female characters in Shonen anime who are, like, the coolest characters in theory, but gradually have all of their personality drained away as they slot into the narrative role of "wife and mother to the child of the male characters who actually matter." That's the kind of disconnect between a character's concept and their arc that makes people get sick of this trope.

Nani, however, is not a character whose personality and motivations get ignored and derailed to make her a prize for a male character. Her motivation from the beginning of the story is to keep her family together by any means necessary - to ensure that Lilo stays with her, because the two sisters need each other if they want to survive the tragedy of their parents' deaths. Nani had a choice before the movie began: let CPS take Lilo away and possibly never see her again, or give up on living a semi-normal life as an 18 year old in exchange for keeping Lilo in her life. It's a very difficult choice, one that requires a lot of sacrifice and suffering on Nani's part, one that the whole world seemed to be telling her not to make, and Nani decided it was worth it anyway.

Both Nani and Lilo share one extremely strong value above all others they have: family. Family is so important that Lilo can completely silence Nani's arguments against Stitch by simply saying the word "ohana," which reminds Nani of how deeply she values loyalty and love to one's family members. No one gets left behind, no one gets forgotten, no one gets abandoned so you can go to college in California. Valuing family isn't something the narrative forces upon Nani at the end so she can be a man's trophy, it's one of her defining traits from the very start of the story. Nani wants nothing more than to keep Lilo in her life. That's her primary and most important motivation.

The fact that the odds are against Nani living up to this virtue are what make her a compelling character. She is inexperienced at parenting, lacking in money, and not particularly adept at navigating the job market. But she persists, because she has to - no one else comes remotely close to understanding Lilo as well as Nani does, and no one else can help Lilo deal with her emotional problems to the extent Nani can. Lilo needs Nani, and the movie shows this time and time again - and yeah, Nani needs Lilo too. What they both need is an additional safety net, and that's what the systems of the society they live in are, for most of the movie, unwilling to provide, as they favor the easier (but far more cruel) solution of separating Lilo from Nani and putting the child in foster care instead.

Nani's determination to stand by Lilo is heroic. It's a classic underdog standing against an unjust system for what is right even if doing what is right seems impossible sort of story. And, like a true hero, she accomplishes the impossible - with the help of unlikely and inhuman companions, because Lilo and Stitch is really a fairy tale with a scifi coat of paint.

The conflict Nani faces in Lilo and Stitch is not "Nani was forced to grow up to fast," but rather "Nani (and Lilo, and Stitch, and everyone else in the plot) lives in a society that thinks the only solution for people with big problems is to isolate the people in question so the rest of society can ignore and forget about them." Like, the movie literally opens with that as the inciting incident: Stitch and Jumba are problematic people, so the alien society banishes Stitch and sends Jumba to prison. Out of sight, out of mind, problem solved? And that's what they're trying to do to Lilo and Nani: separate the sisters, let one get lost in the foster system and the other get lost in poverty, and society can wash its hands of it all and move on.

Lilo and Stitch is smart enough to make sure that the prime enforcers/personifications of these systems are not pure evil. Cobra Bubbles and the Galactic Councilwoman are both well-intentioned people who want to give troubled folk like Nani, Lilo, and Stitch the benefit of the doubt. However, they are also both required by their jobs to enforce systems that are cold, indifferent, and cruel, and so the cruelty of the system becomes their cruelty.

Like, going to that opening scene, the Galactic Councilwoman tries to show Stitch mercy. She just does it in a rushed, doomed-to-fail way, putting Stitch on the spot in a tense trial situation where he's over-stimulated and put on display like a zoo animal and demanding he prove that he's worthy of living in this short interaction with a complete stranger. Should we be surprised that Stitch fails the test and acts out, securing his banishment? It's not a fair test! Neither are the times Cobra Bubbles observes Nani and Lilo - each time he fails to see the full circumstances of what is happening in their lives, looking only at the slapstick havoc that explodes around them without ever sussing out the cause of it (most of Stitch's outbursts aren't actually his fault in that montage, and yet he, Lilo, and Nani are blamed for them anyway). Good intentions, cruel results.

It's only in the finale that both Cobra Bubbles and the Galactic Council Woman realize that the problem isn't Lilo, Stitch, or Nani, but rather the system that is too quick to judge and hasty to condemn them, and the happy ending is only achieved when these two enforcers and personifications of the systems at work decide to purposely bend, twist, and manipulate the rules to create a better solution - one that they know will be hard to explain to their respective superiors. But they do it anyway, because they now know that Nani was right and the system is wrong.

That is the power Nani has in her narrative. Her love is strong enough to make the governments of not only the USA, but of an entire galaxy of alien civilizations, bend and reshape itself. Nani's love for Lilo changes galaxies. I do not think that can be said of a "weak" character.

So if you change the ending and make it end with Nani being proven wrong, you do not empower her. You weaken her. She goes from a hero to a fool, one whose idiocy has to be corrected by an unbeatable system. Worse, you send the message that Lilo is a burden to Nani, an albatross around her neck, something that Nani must cast off in order to self actualize. I cannot think of a more repulsive and disgusting message to send to children than that - "Your sister would be better if she never had to care about you, and if you were a good little sibling you'd tell her that and stop being such a burden to her." Jesus Christ, how vile.

Grace: