Movie: Lilo & Stitch
Grade: A
A stitch in time saves Disney
I'm generally not a fan of Disney's live-action remakes. I wasn't crazy about the new Jungle Book, Lion King, or Beauty and the Beast, and I was particularly disappointed with The Little Mermaid. They don't improve on the originals and are too obviously a grab for money, but with Lilo & Stitch I couldn't be happier. Sometimes Disney gets it right. The right cast. The right script. The right production team. That happened with the original Lilo & Stitch. Asking for lightening to strike twice is usually asking for too much, but once in a while magic happens - and magic is what Disney does best.
In several ways the new Lilo & Stitch is history repeating itself. Back in 2002 Disney badly needed a hit. Both Hercules and Tarzan had performed poorly, and expectations for Lilo & Stitch were not much better. It already had several strikes against it: It wasn't a musical. It had a small cast, and it had aliens (Disney and animated aliens had never paired well), but this was a charming tale.
Set on the island of Oahu, little 6-year-old Lilo lost her parents in a tragic accident and is being raised by her loving but overworked older sister. The film soared. Lilo represented kids who had lost parents and are struggling with how to express their grief. Anti-social and destructive, Lilo is toxic to her sister's attempts to support them. Then Experiment 626 shows up. As an alien engineered to be the ultimate weapon, the small, blue monster is impulsive, destructive, and just what Lilo needs to pull her out of her circumstances. Think of Lilo & Stitch as Disney's version of Terminator 2.
Fast-forward 23 years and Disney is struggling again. Strange Worlds and Wish both bombed, and the remake of Snow White lost the studio a few hundred million. Fortunately, Lilo & Stitch round two has found gold again. Unlike other live-action remakes, Lilo & Stitch is saved by the fact the original was not so imbedded in people's minds that they couldn't make changes. Disney knew they couldn't count on a 6-year-old actress to carry the film, so they expanded the older sister's role. The change improves on the original and makes the film a better fit for teens. In the original the older sister was mostly the victim of Stitch's pranks, but this time she's flushed out. Exhausted, stressed, and on the brink of losing her home and custody of Lilo, she demonstrates everything Disney has learned about sister relationships from films like Frozen and Encanto. She's complicated, and she grounds the film, keeping it from slipping into comedic buffoonery (which the original occasionally did).
Perhaps best of all, apart from Stitch there's almost no CGI. The live-action Lilo & Stitch conjures memories of the best live-action Disney films of the past - films like Escape to Witch Mountain and The Shaggy Dog that The Mouse seemed to have forgotten.
In its opening weekend the $100M budget Lilo & Stitch shot past Tom Cruise's $400M magnum opus Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning ($183M to $77M) to secure the top spot and break a Memorial Day box office record. Audiences made a wise choice.