This pleasant-enough remake of the animated film never quite justifies why that animated film needed to be remade in the first place.
While it’s far more entertaining than the recent Snow White — probably one of the lowest hurdles for any film to clear — the live-action Lilo & Stitch joins its predecessors in failing to justify its own existence. Every time Disney trots out another remake of an established property, that remake, whether it’s delightful or dreadful in its own right, never makes us forget that the studio has already made a better movie with the same title.
And while 2002’s Lilo & Stitch may not have the same cultural pedigree as The Lion King or Lady and the Tramp, it was a delightful throwback, celebrating the simple beauty of watercolor and the poignant power of family in an era when animated films were gravitating toward the obnoxious computer-generated uncanny splonk of Shrek. The digital, alas, has finally overpowered Lilo & Stitch, since this mostly “live-action” movie features a gang of pixel-powered aliens.
The main alien on hand is, of course, Stitch (voiced by Chris Sanders, who co-wrote and co-directed the original animated feature with Dean DeBlois). Starting life as Experiment 626, the toothy blue fuzzball has been deemed too dangerous to live by the interplanetary governing body run by the haughty Grand Councilwoman (Hannah Waddingham). When 626 escapes, she sends the creature’s creator Jumba (Zach Galifianakis) and Earth-obsessed researcher Pleakley (Billy Magnussen) in pursuit.
When 626 lands in Hawaii, Jumba and Pleakley leap into human forms (of the actors playing them) and awkwardly attempt to blend in. Meanwhile, young Lilo (Maia Kealoha) and her teenage sister Nani (Sydney Elizebeth Agudong) are having a tough time of it following the death of their parents — this is a Disney movie, after all — with kindly social worker Mrs. Kekoa (Tia Carrere) doing her best to help the siblings stay together. Their already tenuous homelife is torn further asunder when Lilo “adopts” the chaos-causing 626, whom she renames “Stitch,” after the alien was hiding out in an animal shelter. (Stitch keeps the kid close because he knows his pursuers want to avoid harming any human beings.)
If director Dean Fleischer Camp (Marcel the Shell with Shoes On) and his screenwriters make any significant changes to Sanders and DeBlois’s original, it’s in trying too hard to milk tears from audience members: the prospect of Lilo being separated from Nani, or Nani from Lilo, or Lilo from Stitch is constantly played for pathos, and while the characters’ bonds remain true to the animated film’s “Ohana means family, and family means nobody gets left behind” ethos, what was once delicately played is now delivered with a sledgehammer.
Camp has assembled a fine cast, many of whom gamely spend the film’s running time reacting to a tennis ball (where a CG character will be added later), although Magnussen and Galifianakis don’t get quite enough opportunities to explore their alien discomfort with Earth and its ways, and the talented Courtney B. Vance is reduced to something of a placeholder as alien-tracking CIA agent Cobra Bubbles. Carrere and Amy Hill make a meal of every moment they have on screen, and the real find here is Agudong, who juggles the comedy and the tragedy with genuine empathy.
If nothing else, it would be great if this new Lilo & Stitch sent more viewers back to the 2002 original, which deserves to be as popular as the Stitch plush toys that are still big sellers at all the Disney parks. This remake doesn’t desecrate the memory of that modern classic, but neither does it ever transcend it.
