The Horror of Photorealistic Stitch - Lilo and Stitch Live-Action Review

 I watched some the new Lilo and Stitch "movie" and it was terrible.

This is not a surprise. I was expecting it to be awful because all the live-action Disney remakes are, and was only watching it out of curiosity; I had heard that some of the Experiments from the TV show make a cameo.

I am a huge fan of the original movie, the TV series, and the franchise. I still find the original movie to be very powerful emotionally.

A film like Lilo and Stitch was so memorable because it had those slower, emotionally heavy moments that really hit hard and challenged people. At the same time, the movie balanced this out with humor that didn't contrast with the heavier moments; each moment was given its own space to breathe.

Take for example, the scene where Stitch leaves Lilo after looking at the Ugly Duckling book. It's a silent moment where Stitch simply goes out into the forest and simply says "I'm lost". Stitch is in this existential crisis and the audience can experience his mental state through the time being given to this moment. The music, the visual of Stitch seeing a family of ducklings before he goes to stand alone in the middle of the night, as well as other factors, all contribute to this emotional moment.

This scene is a pivotal point, where Stitch, after being a force of destruction for most of the time until this point really has to grapple with what it is to be alive, and what really matters to him. This is then fulfilled by the climax, where Stitch realises that his life with Lilo, his new family (Ohana) is what gives him purpose and what makes life worth living.

This scene is absent from the live-action remake, in a move that is a perfect microcosm for how this film treats its original material.

 

In this adaptation, all the quiet, slower moments in the movie are taken out in favour of the most obvious jokes and quips; just jangling keys in front of kid’s faces.

I think kids need media that trusts them and respects their intelligence; it’s good for their development and good for older audiences too.

The film is very poorly paced, as if it is speedrunning the story. There's no time given for slow moments. It’s as if the film doesn’t have faith in itself to maintain the audience’s attention. Neither is there charm in this movie, it’s like everything has sucked out and compressed and the new stuff they do put in it is worthless.

Jumba is now the villain, there’s no Gantu, Cobra Bubbles is hunting Stitch for the CIA with another character standing in for his original role of a social worker, Nani leaves Lilo in the care of a family friend at the end. Cobra Bubbles' character is now completely absent of any of the nuance in the original movie, and is instead a one-dimensional agent trying to find Stitch. This is especially difficult because Cobra Bubbles' was such a compelling character in the original movie. He understood that Nani was trying to be in Lilo's life, and was empathetic to her struggle, but he also was responsible for Lilo's wellbeing as a social worker and had to balance the two.

In addition, they got rid of Pleakley’s drag. Pleakley was actually unironically one of the first LGBT characters I saw in media growing up. While the LGBT subtext is more apparent in later entries of the franchise, the original film still showed his subversive approach to gender. While not a perfect depiction in that his behaviour is still considered abnormal, I appreciated how the family just accepts him and his crossdressing, even calling him Lilo’s aunt and using female pronouns in those later entries.

Furthermore, while Pleakley was prissy and goofy in the original movie, he still had dimensionality to him. He had several comic relief moments, including where he gets stung en masse by mosquitoes. However, in addition to this, he and Jumba agreed to save Lilo from Gantu in the climax, he saved Lilo from the exploding house earlier. These character decisions showed that he was more than just comic relief. In this remake however, any competence or moral issues are completely gone from the character, as he is now a vapid fool.

On a tangentially-related note, they do have brief cameos of 624 (Angel), 625 (Reuben), and 627 from the TV Series.

Angel appears briefly as an image, but hilariously it just seems that they traced over a common png of that character.

On another note, I really don’t care for that Experiment’s design. I think it's one of the more generic Experiment designs compared to the designs of other 600+ Experiments in the series. But it’s everywhere in merchandise.