Lilo & Stitch
Lilo & Stitch
A lonely Hawaiian girl befriends a runaway alien, helping to mend her fragmented family.
Connor reviewedMay 24, 2025
We Love:
Pleakley, Nani, Lilo, Stitch, David, Cobra Bubbles, and Tutu. The music, special effects, and costume design.
We Hate:
Jumba, Gantu, Dr. Hamsterveil, and the script.
Dean, the director, claims that the decision to remove Gantu and Dr. Hamsterveil from the film was to ground the plot in realism. A film about aliens no less. By extension, Dean claims that Gantu's presence would be distasteful in scale to other characters in the film. Lastly, Dean adds that the focus of the script was centred on Lilo and Nani's relationship. However, the film is titled Lilo and Stitch, not Lilo and Nani.
What I suspect is the more likely reason behind the decision to cut Gantu was that Dean (and perhaps Disney execs) decided to reduce the presence of gun violence. I support my theory with the scene adapted from the original, in which Stitch encounters the frog for the first time. The original version of this scene has Stitch handling three blasters, but the remake foregoes the blasters altogether.
But perhaps the worst decisions made for the film were turning Jumba into a 2-dimensional villain archetype and appointing Dean Fleischer Camp as director. Jumba's character in the original was funny, warm-hearted, and mischievous all at once, much like his own creation, Experiment 626. His relationship with Lilo, Stitch, and Pleakley in the original was complex and compassionate. The same can not be said for his character in the remake, instead making it difficult to believe in any potential for character growth. The director, on the other hand, seems like perhaps Disney's biggest mistake, just by first glance at his resume. I can not help but think the director's heart wasn't in the project, and this is prevalent in his apparent misunderstanding of the source material.
I can only wonder what Chris Sanders - creator, director, and writer of the original animated film - thinks of the final cut of this new film since his vision was so vastly different. I give the film 4-stars out of 5 because it could have been so much better under different circumstances.