Walt Disney, part LIX: This is my family, I found it all on my own; it's little, and broken, but still good

LILO & STITCH

2002

Written and directed by Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois

Spoilers: high

Disney entered the 21st century stumbling, whether by "Disney" you refer to the vast empire bearing its founder's name, or to the animation studio that had given birth to it; it was not at all certain that the latter would survive, and you could make a strained argument it didn't.  The gloom that inevitably enters into any latterday retrospective of Disney animation once they hit the turn of the millennium is, probably, a little bit premature and ahistoric, at least in how it frames the pessimism of the artists who actually made the art.  It would kind of have to be, if for no other reason than because it forgets that the lead times in animation would push the genesis of a picture made in (for instance) 2002 back quite a few years, back to when Walt Disney Feature Animation was perhaps no longer at its apex—today's subject began development in 1997—but still, in a brighter place.  Likewise, there were still glimmers of light even in the midst of this dark tunnel, and right in between June 2001's Atlantis: The Lost Empire and November 2002's Treasure Planet—a pair of big, brash pieces of studio-imperiling science fiction, spending enormous amounts of money (which they would mostly lose) in their aim to bust blocks and capture all four quadrants—came in June 2002 a noticeably smaller Disney movie, that nevertheless outperformed both.  It is also, curiously, yet another film dependent on science fiction, but that sci-fi is at least a little less important here; it relies so much more (than Atlantis, in particular) on Disney animation's traditional competencies—telling heartfelt stories with instantaneous emotional appeal, secured by carefully-drawn characters feeling feelings, in addition to a factor that I'm afraid we must call "cuteness"—that it even overshoots the previous era of Disney ascendancy, not even feeling like a late resurgence of the "Disney Renaissance" mode of storytelling (you can understand how the makers of Atlantis and Treasure Planet tricked themselves when you remember that Disney animation since The Little Mermaid had increasingly self-consciously pursued the epic and the action-packed), but more like a full-on throwback to when Disney was avowedly making small-scaled, ahem, family entertainment.  If that sounds like I'm actually calling it a children's cartoon, well...

This was Lilo & Stitch, and it began in two places: the first was at an executive retreat, where Thomas Schumacher (not yet head of WDFA, though he would be for most of its production) received support for his position that Disney, in its newfound glory, should try to make a movie like 1942's Dumbo, smaller but with a big heart; inasmuch as this was not actually "an idea," and barely "an idea for an idea," where it actually began was in Chris Sanders's sketchbook, all the way back in 1985, before he came to work for Disney, when he came up with a doodle of a character named "Stitch," a mayhem-prone freak that Sanders may or may not have realized even then was ready to be made into millions of plush dolls for a generation of children seeking an ugly-cute edge in their sleepytime companions.  He had once hoped to use Stitch in a children's book that never came into existence, and Stitch had, ever since, sort of just hung around in the back of Sanders's head; now, during a conversation with Schumacher, the executive asked him for a pitch, and Schumacher recognized a modern Dumbo when he saw it.

And so, supporting his decision on the basis of Sanders's substantial contributions over the years (most notably to Mulan), Schumacher delivered to Sanders the resources to direct a movie about little Stitch, gently nudging him into actually coming up with a backstory for the monster and, more importantly, advising/commanding Sanders that if the movie were to be made, when Stitch meandered his way into our world, he should meet people rather than woodland animals.  (Sanders filed the rejected part of his pitch away; The Wild Robot came out in 2024.)  Stitch was now explained as an alien monster, and Sanders, almost randomly—he'd just taken a vacation there—made the excellent decision to resituate his nebulous story of a boy and his monster from Kansas to Hawaii (specifically Kaua'i, which is important, too, since it's almost as far away from "metropolitan" Hawaii as you can get and still be in Hawaii).  He also realized that the boy should be a girl, since Stitch, though not really strongly gendered, was referred to as "he" and kind of had a masculine cast to him, given that Stitch is an alien super-weapon programmed only for destruction.  (In fact, his first thought was to make Stitch an alien gangster, something that makes so little sense when set against the final film, where he's a precocious baby, that I'm perplexed how it would've worked.)  At some point, Sanders realized Stitch would need to speak; he provided his own voice, an up-pitched, gurgly, epiglottis-flapping* funny voice that he had honed for numerous years as a method for annoying his co-workers, though it's endearing when it's mostly nonverbal and you only hear it forming words four or five times throughout the film.

I keep crediting Sanders alone, but by now Sanders had already paired off with Dean DeBlois, a colleague he'd worked with on Mulan; their collaboration would pay off even more richly in the future, albeit at Jeffrey Katzenberg's company, instead of Walt Disney's.  For the present, the pair of them, co-directing and co-writing Lilo & Stitch, were freed from much of the usual micromanaging, Atlantis and Treasure Planet and other things presumably absorbing so much of the executives' interest that they didn't have the energy to bother with a movie that, by 2002 standards, wasn't terribly expensive (Lilo & Stitch ultimately cost $80 million, the cheapest "canonical" Disney feature in years); and, not to necessarily draw a straight line between these two things, when it was released in the summer of 2002, it provided Disney with its very last "traditionally" animated box office hit ($273 million worldwide).  This came part and parcel with Lilo & Stich being the only Disney cartoon of the 00s (give or take a Princess and the Frog, and I'm very much leaning towards "take") to have a real, lasting, culture-wide impact: I would not rule out "over a billion dollars in merchandise sales," but I mainly mean in terms of people loving it then and still loving it now, as a warm, cozy blanket of a movie that I get the impression parents are more eager to share with their kids than any of the dozen or so Disney movies around it.

This is me speaking in "objective historian" mode.  In "subjective critic" mode, I will confess I don't like Lilo & Stitch as much as I am probably "supposed" to, and not even because it's a "children's cartoon," since it exceeds by a startling margin what you would reasonably expect a "children's cartoon" in 2002 to achieve, in terms of its emotional honesty and psychological acuity.  It does so without necessarily being entirely satisfying anyway, for various reasons that don't have that much to do with its central dynamic or the core of its story—or, for that matter, its craft—but still manage to make it clumsy and disappointing, because the parts that don't work are a pretty large fraction of it.  Of course, the parts that do—that "central dynamic," that "core of the story"—are more important.  But the way the movie's built made it easy for it to lose focus on them; it starts out without any apparent focus at all.

So, we begin in space, where we behold the trial of outlaw geneticist Jumba (David Ogden Stiers), hauled before an enormous pan-galactic tribunal for his crimes against Space God, especially his 626th experiment, a dog-sized hexapodal abomination with giant ears**, sharp spines, and a gaping mouth that makes his head more like a lid for his body; this is the thing that shall eventually receive the name "Stitch."  Jumba avers that 626 is a "success," but for Jumba "success" means "perfectly designed for causing chaos," as the monstrosity's captors discover when he escapes his imprisonment via loogey-based strategem, hijacks a ship, and heads, arbitrarily, to an insignificant blue-green planet at the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the galaxy.  The aliens' leader (Zoe Caldwell), at the insistence of ecologically-minded bureaucrat Pleakley (Kevin MacDonald), is swayed to handle the matter quietly, and, rather to Pleakley's chagrin, sends both him and Jumba, offered a commutation if he assists, off on their mission to capture or eliminate 626 without unduly disrupting life on this planet, called by its inhabitants, I believe, "E-Arth."  But then, 626 is about to be captured by those inhabitants anyway: as soon he arrives, he meets with an automobile accident, is mistaken for a mutant dog and commended to the care of the local Kaua'i humane society, and is finally adopted out to our little weirdo, Lilo Pelekai (Daveigh Chase).  The whole thing's something of hail mary thrown by her adult sister and harried guardian Nani (Tia Carrerre), who hopes that it will give her younger sibling a channel for her energies and idiosyncrasies, and provide her a salve of affection to help her get over their parents' simultaneous death on a rainswept stretch of road a few months earlier.  She hopes, at least, that it'll mollify Lilo long enough for Nani to get their unusually-fearsome social services caseworker Bubbles (Ving Rhames) off their back about the Pelekais' living conditions, Nani's meager income, and Lilo's antisocial acting-out.  Indeed, it even mostly works—for despite the Pelekais having made the error of believing Stitch to be a pet rather than a doomsday weapon, he's remarkably trainable, and while dodging his extraterrestrial pursuers, Stitch learns for himself the universal concept lovingly described by the Hawaiian word, 'ohana, deciding to abandon his destructive tendencies and embrace being part of a family, which, as Lilo & Stitch will never tire of reminding us, means never being left behind, or forgotten.

See, what you'll notice immediately, if you've ever seen Lilo & Stitch, as I'm rather sure you have, is that it's half of that summary before we even leave the God-damned, incident-inciting prologue, and while that could be perfectly fine—incidents should take some effort to incite, after all!—I was still being more efficient than the movie is about it, so of Lilo & Stitch's slim 85 minute runtime, the action-oriented set-up—"Stitch escapes, Jumba and Pleakley take on the hypothetically grave task of neutralizing him," which is plot material that exists solely to prompt the actual movie, "an interesting family meets a supranormal friend, and they bond"—occupies a surprisingly enormous proportion of it.  It goes on for almost exactly ten minutes, despite probably strictly needing about four, and arguably not needing to be there at all, in something like the same way that E.T. does not begin with laboriously detailing how E.T. boarded his interstellar field trip bus, or whatever it was E.T. is implying about E.T.'s visit to Earth, because Stitch's malign purpose (and even his backstory) could probably have been communicated by means besides ten minutes of what amounts to pure exposition.

Now, it's not actually just exposition, though on a third or fourth watch it feels even more like a structural mistake than it did the first time.  At least in my case, it provides a keener-every-time sense of dissonance between what I already know the movie's about, and what the movie sure initially seems like it'd prefer to be about, namely a sci-fi action-comedy boasting a bizarre and unsuccessful mix of at least three not-so-similar tones: there's the animated space opera that it seems to want you to actually take halfway-seriously, as a world-building exercise and swashbuckling adventure; then a sort of dry, Hitchhiker's Guide To the Galaxy-style absurdism about sci-fi tech and space bureaucracy that's mishandled on its own merits (the plot turns to no small degree on a senseless running joke about how the inhabitants of Earth that the galactic authorities are actually worried about are the mosquitos, "an endangered species," whatever the hell that means in this context—whereas the descriptions of how Jumba intends Stitch to bring down whole civilizations represent a potential source of humor that, nonetheless, winds up only extremely anemically pursued, particularly when any given "real" city is mostly just a more sprawling version of the same urbanized environment Stitch finds in Kaua'i); and finally we have just a whole heap of full-on family animated feature comic relief, at present relieving us from a "drama" that hasn't even been gestured at yet.

Now, that spit-based escape is reasonably cool, but the action-comedy sci-fi parts of the film are also let down a little by having the worst design attached to them: the alien life forms themselves at least aren't entirely lazy, even if Stitch is by parsecs the one with the most thought put into him, but the technology is a wholly-uninspired "rocketships are cars" parody of space travel, further undermined by someone going real apeshit with the copy-and-paste function in CAPS, along with all the spaceships' intrusions of painted CGI into a movie that doesn't seem to want any CGI at all (the finale, at least, was supposed to be on a hijacked 747, before, you know, 9/11 happened, and painted CGI or not, maybe it played better).  Once the "plot" side of the movie settles down on Earth, Jumba and Pleakley basically never exit their designated "dipshit cartoon comedy" ambit, mostly entailing unconvincing "Earthling" disguises.  As far as Disney comic relief goes, it's not even a close encounter of the worst kind (Stiers is good at being a glib and for-some-reason-vaguely-Russian-accented alien mad scientist, and MacDonald is good at being a supercilious wimp), but they can never amount to anything more than an unserious and unwelcome distraction until the finale, which, itself, broadens out into an unserious and unwelcome and awkwardly-staged and kind-of-stupid action sequence.  (It is annoyingly unclear in this sequence, anyhow, why Stitch and company are not desperately trying to communicate with the barely-more-competent alien captain (Kevin Michael Richardson) who's finally arrived to finish the job the hard way, and kidnapped Lilo by accident—he's not even holding her hostage, he literally just doesn't know he's got her in the glass cage from which Stitch has already escaped, by means of what I've never been able to read as anything besides an animation error—and the unappetizing reality of it is that this is simply a Disney movie in 2002, and Disney movies in 2002 are required to end with manic action, and Sanders and DeBlois were running hard up against a deadline due to those aforementioned post-9/11 reconceptualizations.)

All of this is to say that the movie's mere scaffolding is allowed to be far too visible; and I will further suggest it takes valuable time away from what we're here for, which is Lilo, and Stitch, and Nani, and maybe Nani's could-be-boyfriend David (Jason Scott Lee), if we can fit him in (and we barely can), and in fact a disagreeable percentage of "Lilo, Stitch, and Nani" is itself "fit in" by way of time-compressing montage.  But the part we're here for, I'm pleased to agree, is very good, starting with the smart, scarcely-acknowledged mirroring of our titular protagonists—two children, each with tendencies towards destruction, if Lilo's on a markedly more domestic scale, and for neither of them is it really their fault—and Lilo is even the sort of kid's movie protagonist that makes one kind of reluctant to actually use the term, "kid's movie."  She's a genuinely shocking figure for such a movie, allowed to be at least as awful as she is cute, and usually comic in her disconnection from reality, but there's a bleak and worrisome edge to her behavior and personality: she punches people, and even bites them, and thinks they'll still be her friends; she may actually be getting her sister into trouble on purpose, on top of all the times she does so by accident; she asks people she's just met if they've ever killed anybody, and seems to know when they have; she blithely traipses into what I assume must have been received as outrageously child-unfriendly hazards, such as climbing into clothes dryers.  (They changed it for later home video releases, thanks to some of Disney's most egregiously lame self-censorship; it resulted, it seems, in the eye-rolling indifference of the artists tasked with carrying it out, who repainted the dryer as some kind of "pizza pantry," i.e., an appliance that does not and has never existed.)

Turn it on.  You'll be free.

In any case, she's much akin to Calvin, of Calvin & Hobbes, though if Calvin were vastly more like an actual human child, and also if his parents had just died, and if Hobbes were real but, initially, was just exploiting him, and wanted most of all to leave.  (This realism does have the potential drawback, however, of rendering Lilo a much more opaque figure than we're used to in kid's movies—almost more a legitimate psychological study of an unwell child than what you'd expect out of an accessible Disney film protagonist—but that's special enough in this milieu, and productive enough in the execution, that I could not count it as "a problem."  You feel miserable for her anyway, even if her still-forming personality is sketched principally through a daydreaming, sometimes-morbid delusionality and an unaccountable obsession with Elvis Presley—and in the case of the soundtrack, it turns out that Disney money is good for some things.)

Nani, meanwhile, is at least as good (it is also the best performance I'm aware of Carrere ever giving).  She's just, like, some gal, you know?: extremely put-upon, Cinderella-style, but never forwarded as exceptional, and given leave to be messy—for instance, our introduction to Nani involves not only threatening Lilo with colorful death, but kicking strangers' cars.  (Obviously, it turns out it was the social worker's.)  Even outside of that very fraught first encounter, Nani may honestly spend more time being angry, frustrated, tired, pleading, and working her shitty job(s) than she spends without the resentment she feels at the hand fate's dealt her being foregrounded in either her voice performance or her animation, and while we are invited to understand that this demonstrates how her love for her sister is unconditional, it's not fair to expect that love to be happy and smiling, when it's comprehensible mostly only as a matter of 21st century social mores how she keeps herself from smacking Lilo a lot.  The brevity of the movie means Nani doesn't have the most sharply-defined personality herself—I don't think you could rightly say she has "a character arc"—but the ambiguities, like "how much does she perceive David's romantic overtures to be, in the moment, a pestering annoyance?", feel organic: like whatever it was she wanted to be got shoved into a neglected corner by what she had to be.

This total impression, of the most normal—goodness, downright plebeian—heroines that any Disney movie ever had, is assisted significantly by Sanders's character design, even if Sanders's Stitch is the show.  I mean, of course Stitch is great, we all know that, and I've more-or-less already described why (though I suppose I didn't mention his ability to withdraw his extra arms and spines to slightly more persuasively pretend to be "a dog," though as Nani remarks she's pretty sure he's a koala).  If pressed, I would happily accord the gold here to Stitch's supervising animator, Alex Kuperschmidt, if nothing else just for the way that the slitting of Stitch's eyelids so readily conveys his pitiful pathos, in between fits of mania punctuated by dramatic, villainous posing.  (My main disappointment with Stitch is that I really need him to be meaner: he does, it's true, use a child as a human shield, but I'm not even perfectly sure that Sanders and DeBlois always want you to notice that; but for a living weapon he's simply not very effective in his violence, and you can sort of see the calculations being made when, e.g., he's confronted for a second time with that annoying frog that greeted him after his crash landing, insofar as I am absolutely sure somebody suggested that Stitch eat the frog in one startling bite—possibly with its dead arm still hanging out—but they were overruled.)  But the character design is good all over, even for the background players who exist mainly as the butt of jokes, so Lilo and Nani get the best of the rest of it, bolstered by their respective supervising animators, Andreas Deja and Stephane Saint-Foi (Saint-Foi, coming off of helping Ken Duncan with Meg on Hercules, makes great sense; I assume Deja was at this point just showing off his range).  Now, some of that excellent "regular jane" complexion is just Sanders cheating, by way of the Pelekais' rather bizarre "potato noses," which I'm not sure I approve of even if they do get across the idea.  (They are, happily, seen on some of the white characters, too, so it's not a matter of "this isn't what you think Polynesians look like, is it?")  Nani, in particular, gets occasional attention for departing from Disney boilerplate, and unfortunately this often came couched in the kind of language one might use to politely call somebody "fat"—which says something about how positively warped turn-of-the-millennium people could be, and it certainly isn't as nice or socially-beneficial as they seemed to think it was, given that we could ballpark Nani at an athletic 140 pounds—and it isn't very apt anyway, since what Sanders's design and especially Saint-Foi's animation are really insisting on is a sense of grounded physicality in Nani that makes her seem tough, muscular and robust and capable of shouldering the burden that's been foisted upon her.  Or they just meant she doesn't have dainty ankles, I don't know, but that's part of the effect, too.

So what we have is a dynamic more than a plot.  It's delightful, and more delightful the more distance it can put between itself and the aliens.  (As a matter of narrative function, in fact, Bubbles is a much better "villain": Rhames's Marsellus-Wallace-but-for-kids florid threats and general overbearingness are not merely funnier than their more bumble-prone comic relief, but accordingly more dangerous, and I half-wonder if at some point Sanders or DeBlois or somebody thought about just cutting bait on the aliens; or maybe I ought to just say what I think, "they should have."  I'm speculating, but Bubbles or at least his "are Hawaiian social services part of the deep state?" man-in-black design—that design being credited not to Sanders, but to Bubbles's animator, Byron Howard—seems to have been a late addition, and as much as I complain about Shadowy Government subplots, somehow I feel like the movie might be a little cleaner if his backstory as an alien-chasing CIA operative were not a complete coincidence/joke.)

As for the movie overall, I could say, it's a dynamic and a vibe, and of the many ways that vibe manifests—the empathy-pummeling sadness of Lilo, and the less-aggressive but pretty much equally empathy-pummeling question of how Nani emotionally survives, each contrasted with the cartoonish vigor of Stitch and the fact that their scrapes, while increasingly a matter of life and death (or at least homelessness, poverty, and so on), are individually pretty low-impact, and separated by scenes where the sisters are revealed to remain capable of joy, after all—possibly the most thoroughgoing way it manifests is just Lilo & Stitch's curious vision of Kaua'i, with production designer Paul Felix and the background painters imposed upon to go way back in time.  Doing their backdrops in transparent watercolors rather than gouache**, this marked the first (and last) time for the medium in a Disney feature since, yep, Dumbo (though a few package film segments had used it afterwards).  The upshot is a world of visible paint and paper, "a storybook" in an almost literal sense, where watching the movie on a screen still kind of actually looks like flipping through a children's book, very contemporary in its styling and confident in its poppy colors, but charming and hazy the way a fable ought to be.  Hell, even the sci-fi crap I keep complaining about still has something to recommend it on the basis of its watercolor backdrops, in their case less like a "storybook" and more like magazine illustration or European comic book covers; and I'm sort of in awe at how the effects animators manage such realistic Pacific water, often including its optical properties, without jarring too hard against the relaxed gauziness of the backgrounds.  It's all just so pleasant and heartmelting, and all the moreso when, thanks to the social realism cutting against it being just pleasant or just heartwarming, it never feels entirely overdetermined and treacly.

Or at least it doesn't till the end, which frankly mishandles the whole "magical friend" kid's adventure fable thing, maybe not specifically because the plot contorts to ensure that Lilo and Stitch shall (apparently) be united forever—though fully-happy endings in these things do tend to be counterproductive, since the point here would presumably be to provide children the tools to process loss, not to mention the basic fact that magical friends aren't real (but then, Disney's whole business model is to sell you a stuffed simulacrum)—but even if that's something of a demerit, my distaste mostly comes from this ending having no apparent interest in hiding Disney's belief that the family that Sanders and DeBlois have put together, which now even includes those other two aliens, would make for a very marketable basis for an ABC television cartoon along with other DTV adventures.  (Since we're here, I must also gripe about Sanders and DeBlois's distracting and so-obnoxiously "of 2002" layout choices at the end: it's actually a tiny bit of a problem throughout, but until the climax not a film-degrading one, but a lot of that climax is delivered by way of fucking shakycam.  I don't know about you, but that's why I'm sitting down to watch a cartoon—for the visceral, tangible camerawork.)

So for this and other reasons, I'm colder on Lilo & Stitch than many, and I've never quite been able to shake the feeling that—with the immense exception of its watercolor backgrounds—it doesn't really benefit that much from being an animated film in the first place, while, in certain respects, it would almost certainly have been better in live-action.  Not that this means I'm validating Disney's actual decision to remake it as a live-action movie for 2025, which will obviously be as much a "live-action" movie as Roger Rabbit at best: I obviously mean "a live-action movie from the 80s, or 90s, where Stitch would have been some combination of puppetry and animatronics, which might've been even more mind-bendingly cute."  But such a thing would have opened it up to possibilities that a Disney cartoon was not going to seize (it's rated PG, but I defy you to tell me why), closed it down to the possibilities that a Disney cartoon provided but aren't useful (again, 11% of the damn movie is "space opera" prologue, and another 11% is aliens in bad humanface), and, if the latter weren't around so much to gunk things up, the actual story would've had more room to breathe.  Plus it fundamentally just seems like it would have preferred to be what it so closely resembles; I of course mean Mac and Me.  This isn't really "criticism," of course (or if it is, it's very obtuse criticism, of the "this movie should be a different movie" variety), but maybe it helps explain it to myself why I barely like it more than, say, Gremlins (or, shit, Critters), when what I like in it I adore it without much reservation at all.  Then again, I look at what it most resembles in the previous decade and a half of children's cartoons that concerned themselves with sending sad little kids off on life-affirming little adventures—Oliver & Company, We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story, All Dogs Go To Heaven—and I'm kind of flabbergasted it's even good, let alone almost great.

Score: 7/10

*I think.  Feels like it, but I'm having some trouble precisely determining what part of the anatomy is implicated when one does their "spit voice."

**Suspiciously mouse-like ears, at that.  Though I don't think "x-treme 90s Mickey" could have been intentional.

**Or opaque watercolor, which I have in the past found confusing.  The aesthetic differentiation, evidently the cause of much recrimination between their proponents across the 19th century, is in how it produces color and whether it hides the substrate.