I haven't seen the new Lilo & Stitch and I'm not going to (and neither should you), and I'm not Hawaiian, so I'm not qualified to weigh in on how the remake butchers Hawaiian culture and the themes of the original (but you should go read what Hawaiian people have already written about that).
What stands out to me and I can talk about, though, is how I can see the Executive Meddling Logic in having Nani abandon Lilo, and I hate it. And it's reflective of... how much more limited Socially Acceptable Options for young women have gotten since 2002, and how much worse, in some ways, family structure shaming has gotten.
Like. In 2002, there was absolutely cultural stigma on a 19 year old woman acting as guardian for her orphaned younger sibling. That stigma forms the movie's central conflict, after all (although -- again, not Hawaiian, I can't speak to that -- as I understand it, that family structure is stigmatized in mainstream U.S. culture but not in Hawaiian culture, forming another big part of the central conflict). But there was enough of a counter-narrative that a major studio could make a mainstream movie depicting that stigma as wrong.
But in 2025, well, that would send the wrong message. Depicting a 19 year old woman as a capable sibling-guardian who doesn't see her younger sibling as ruining her life is, like. Too dangerously close to depicting her as a competent parent. Which is too dangerously close to promoting teen pregnancy. Or something. An inferior type of family absolutely cannot be a happy ending. A young woman can't want to take care of her little sister. That's not on the approved list of things she's allowed to want (she's not allowed to want to be a surfer either, despite the important role of surfing in Hawaiian culture, because surfing is silly and trivial, obviously; that's not on the Approved Life Path list).
Obviously there are orphaned siblings caring for their younger siblings in 2025 just as there were in 2002 and throughout human history, but it's not Middle Class Disney Family acceptable now. Like, in 2002, The Baileys (the imaginary middle class couple Chuck Schumer made up) might have thought "If we both die, I hope our young adult child can take custody of the younger one so they don't end up separated or in foster care", but in 2025, they wouldn't fathom such a thing. Real people might, but not The Platonic Ideal of Disney Family.
