by Cain Noble-Davies

Year:  2025

Director:  Dean Fleischer Camp

Rated:  PG

Release:  22 May 2025

Distributor: Disney

Running time: 108 minutes

Worth: $8.00
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Cast:
Maia Kealoha, Chris Sanders (voice), Sydney Elizebeth Agudong, Zach Galifianakis, Billy Magnussen, Courtney B. Vance, Tia Carrere, Jason Scott Lee, Hannah Waddingham, Amy Hill

Intro:
… its milquetoast humour and forced drama aren’t enough to fill in the gap where a beating heart should be.

Of the Disney animated films from the 2000s that have gone on to attain cult status, like Treasure Planet and The Emperor’s New Groove, Lilo & Stitch might be the most special: a parable on found family that exuded Otherness by design with its feral lead characters, Queer-coded aliens, nuanced interpersonal relationships, and a wholesome aesthetic as warm and fuzzy as its central critter. As much as it will make those who grew up with the film feel decrepit at the thought that it is now old enough to be remade, there is a logic to it, especially when helmed by a director like Dean Fleischer Camp, whose work on Marcel the Shell with Shoes On highlighted a real knack for merging animation and live-action.

But Camp wrote Marcel… Lilo & Stitch is scripted by Chris Kekaniokalani Bright (making his feature debut) and Mike Van Waes (whose only other credit is the Buzzfeed-produced Dear David). Their inexperience comes through sharply in the way that they mix around the essentials of the original, echoing Beauty and the Beast in how some characters are de-emphasised to try and elevate the status of others. And it fails for the same reason: It just leaves everyone feeling off

Stitch’s chaotic and destructive side is kept intact (if not amplified), but the more constructive and compassionate moments that showed he was more than just what he was ‘designed’ for, not so much. In the absence of Captain Gantu as a main antagonist, the formerly bumbling and goofy mad scientist Dr. Jumba is now the big bad, teaming up with Pleakley (not in drag, more’s the pity) to do fifth-rate 3^rd Rock from the Sun antics. Cobra Bubbles is no longer a caring social worker with an interesting past, but just another government spook. And while Lilo and Nani’s sisterhood is maintained, it’s been given further grounding that, without the approachability of animation, makes the child protective services subplot come across way more troubling than it should, and indeed did in the original.

The found family unit here is basically reduced to just Lilo, Nani, and Stitch, and by narrowing the original’s scope as far as who is included in that unit (one of the best qualities of the original film), it ends up betraying the very idea of ohana that the story revolves around. Production-wise, the supporting cast is made lesser just so the narrative focus can be on Lilo and Nani (because birth family takes precedence, apparently), and even with Stitch, the side of his personality that would make a family want him to be part of it, is dampened to emphasise how… well, alien he is. It’s been warped from a story about Others finding company and love amongst each other into one that, try as the ending might to backpedal, comes across more like a shrugging admission that, sometimes, you can and should leave family behind.

Lilo & Stitch badly fumbles the core message that made the original so special. It commits a lot of the same sins as previous awful Disney live-action remakes (the lack of vibrancy in the live-action transition from Aladdin, the misplaced emphasis on realism over expressiveness or personality from The Lion King, and the character mismanagement of Beauty and the Beast), and even when taken on its own terms, its milquetoast humour and forced drama aren’t enough to fill in the gap where a beating heart should be. Leave it behind and forget it.