I have never seen anything so satisfyingly bad in my entire life, and we’re going on like ten years of these Live Action Remakes.
Don’t you DARE go see this movie if you love the real Lilo & Stitch.
1 - Where is Gantu? Why did they cut him out of the trailer? Is it because they haven’t finished rendering him yet, because let me tell you, that’s what it looks like for every other character.
2 - Why is Stitch so small. Why is he so small. Why is Stitch that small. He’s supposed to be the same size as Lilo. 1 because it creates more visually-appealing shot compositions when the story is focused on the TWO of them 2 because thematically he is “a future Lilo,” he is the little monster-version of herself that she could turn into if she didn’t have family 3 because the size of a 6 year-old is the perfect balance between “threatening” and “non-threatening” when he has to interact with toddlers and 18 year-old women and 40-foot-tall aliens alike. He cannot. BE. That small. What, we’re supposed to have him stand up on a stool or a stack of books or a countertop every time he and Lilo need to look each other in the eyes?? Did anyone think while making this movie?
3 - How does his orange jumpsuit look so much lazier than it does when it’s a hand-drawn collection of colors and shapes in the original?
4 - Why did they choose the take where the New Nani Actress said “nobody get’s left behind” in a whiny, exasperated voice? When the real Nani specifically delivered that line as if she were somberly, mournfully, reverently remembering what her parents told her? And then moves on to “slightly-annoyed” but only when it’s time to say “I know, I know.”
5 - Why is Stitch so small.
6 - Is that Jumba’s voice?? Why? Why is it not even deep? Why did they re-write the line so he doesn’t mention Stitch as a “monstrosity?”
7 - Speaking of monstrosities—go back and re-do Pleakley. All of him. What—what happened. What happened?? They made every alien I can see in the trailer uglier and less appealing than Stitch—which is SO NOT THE POINT OF HIS CHARACTER DESIGN—but none looked worse to me than Pleakley. He has a fish eye. It is horrifying.
8 - And they made sun-tan-ice-cream-tourist look local. So like…what’s the point of her taking his picture, then? In the beginning of the movie? He’s in the movie to be an example of a hapless tourist, and tourists mean something specific in LILO’s little headspace—she takes safari-pictures of them in her hometown like they’re a rare, foreign sight, because that’s her way of processing the reality that these are people who specifically come to her home just to leave again—and Lilo has issues with people leaving.
9 - Don’t put Stitch on a leash. Don’t do that. There’s a reason they don’t do that in the movies. 1 He is super strong and he is not trying that hard to hide his super strength, especially not when it comes to resisting Nani telling him what to do. 2 Lilo and Nani live in a very laid-back sleepy neighborhood, it changes the vibe when dogs are on leashes. It’s supposed to feel so laid-back that there are lots of free-roaming dogs and no strictly-enforced leash-laws. There are other dogs in the movie and none of them wear leashes or collars. (I know it’s small but the small choices build the movie.)
10 - Lilo. I like that little girl. She can play Lilo all day for all I care. But that is not Lilo. Lilo doesn’t get hip-checked to the ground and then sit there looking sad. I don’t—why do I have to say that? That’s many people’s favorite part of the movie, that she just goes ballistic on Mertle the minute she’s provoked. That better just be a specific edit in the trailer. They better not have cut out her punching Mertle Edmunds in the face. And you know what else? She does not. SCREAM. When she first meets Stitch! You know they could’ve done that, right?? You realize that every other character who sees Stitch for the first time reacts LIKE THIS:
BUT NOT LILO. LILO does not react like any old stereotypical girl. She also does not react like any alien from any planet or any grown women or any tourists expecting to see foreign sights. She reacts uniquely like Lilo: like a nervous little girl hoping to find a friend, who doesn’t bat an eye if that potential friend is blue and shark-mouthed and monstrous. (Everything else about that little girl is perfect, I like her line delivery, I like that she goes “pretty close” when he mispronounces “family,” the original Lilo says “pretty close” in the same tone when she’s trying to teach him how to say new words in the television series.) 11 - Why doesn’t Stitch’s face move at all? Why does it look like his eye muscles and nose muscles have no range of motion, but his lips have way too much? He’s supposed to talk with his jaws more than his lips, like how a crocodile can’t chew or keep food in so it just opens and shuts it’s jaw and throws food to the back of it’s head.
12 - Speaking of re-writing lines, what’s with Lilo and Stitch having an exchange where he admits to being “bad??” And then she point-blank says “family isn’t perfect. But that doesn’t mean they’re not good.”
Is that supposed to be a nod to Stitch saying, at the end of the movie, “It’s little and broken but still good?”
Do you know why the real Stitch is the one to say “it’s (his family’s) little and broken, but still good?” Because he’s saying “good” as in, “acceptable.” “The way it ought to be.” Not “good” as in “morally good” the way that Stitch is “morally bad.” He just uses the word “good” because Stitch can barely speak English and that was the simplest, best way for him to say what he was trying to communicate. If you take him to mean “morally good” then the whole point of the movie gets ruined.
The point of the movie is that the people in your family aren’t perfect, but imperfection won’t break your LOVE for them. It doesn’t mean you ignore your imperfections, and it doesn’t mean you embrace those imperfections and celebrate those imperfections—if it did, you know what, Stitch would still push Lilo to the ground and wreck her stuff and laugh when she’s hurting, the way he does because of his “imperfections” at the start of the movie. But instead, what family is supposed to do with “imperfections,” according to the original movie, is love you anyway and stick around helping you work through them.
That’s the whole point of “nobody gets left behind or forgotten.”
It cannot mean “family members aren’t perfect but we still believe they’re morally good people.” Because that implies that it’s the fact that they’re “morally good people” that makes you stick around, when the whole point of the movie is the opposite: Stitch is objectively morally evil, and they choose to stick around anyway.
Stitch is objectively morally evil. I have to stress that. That’s the whole movie. The whole movie is “what if we start with the villain and redeem him.” If he’s not a villain he doesn’t need redeeming and if he’s not bad it takes all the power out of Lilo’s love for him.
And honestly, he never comes to terms with the fact that he’s “morally bad” in this movie. That’s not the point. He would never admit “Stitch bad” in the original movie. Chris Sanders said, “By the end of the film, he’s not a better person. He has just understood family.”
He becomes “a better person” in the epilogue. But in the original movie, Stitch doesn’t think so much about the difference between “bad” and “good.” He thinks more about the difference between “belonging” and “not belonging.”
Why is this so hard
If you like me don’t go see this movie. More importantly, if you like the original movie—if you think it was good—if you think it was excellent—accept no imitations. Do not go see this new remake.
Remember what Anika Noni Rose just said about the new Princess and the Frog shorts that are coming out—Disney is counting numbers. Do not stream. Do not buy tickets. Just stream and watch the original. And tweet Chris Sanders and tell him how much you love the old one.
