Lilo & Stitch: Live-Action Lilo Remake Feels Stitched Together

By Chris Knight

Rating: C+

Disney’s Lilo & Stitch is about a dangerous alien lifeform that escapes from its creators, arrives on a backward planet and charms the inhabitants. Which is not a bad metaphor for Disney itself. It continues to remake hand-drawn animated classics as bloated live-action spectacles, hoping a nostalgic moviegoing public will continue to greet them with open arms and wallets.

The tactic has achieved mixed results to date. Disney’s latest, based on its very first animated feature, 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, arrived in March to middling reviews and so-so box office numbers. The Little Mermaid was a box office hit in 2023, but astute observers noted that it failed to prove why it was needed. And in 2019, Tim Burton’s weird Dumbo failed to take flight, delivering more dumb than “Oh!”

Which brings us to Lilo & Stitch. Released in 2002, in the waning days of Disney’s hand-drawn animated feature productions, it delighted audiences and critics alike, and placed 14th at the box office that year — not bad when you consider it was up against the latest chapters of Star Wars, Harry Potter, James Bond, Men in Black, Austin Powers and The Lord of the Rings.

Its live-action remake is, to quote a famous saying about the planet on which it takes place, “mostly harmless.” Maia Kealoha stars as Lilo Pelekai, a six-year-old orphaned Hawaiian girl with a mean streak almost as bad as that of the visiting alien.

Chris Sanders, who created Stitch and directed the original movie, returns to voice the CG-generated version in this one. And Sydney Agudong plays Nani, Lilo’s older sister and de factor parent, providing whatever emotional heavy lifting the film requires.

There’s also some nice continuity in the form of Tia Carrere, who voiced the original Nani and returns here as a social worker. The first film’s social worker, Cobra Bubbles (voiced by Ving Rhames), is now Courtney B. Vance playing a CIA operative. (Because you can’t spell “social worker” without CIA.)

If you know the original, there’s little in the way of surprises here. Stitch, designed as a walking weapon of mass destruction, escapes a galactic tribunal and arrives on Earth, where he hopes to avoid capture by using Lilo as a human shield. Of course, the kid’s heartfelt feelings about family (or ‘ohana in Hawaiian) eventually convince Stitch that it’s better to belong than to destroy.

Fans will be happy to note that the new movie retains some of the Elvis references of the original, and that the pacing keeps its speedy, cartoon clip, although it still manages to clock in at 108 minutes, against the original’s 85.

My biggest complaint is that the movie imagines you can revive someone with a car battery if the defibrillator fails to do its job, but I’m here to say that the 12 volts under the hood are no match for professional life-saving equipment. I can’t find much else to fault about the film, except that it didn’t need remaking in the first place.

But try telling that to Disney, which has Moana coming out next summer — the first of the CG-animation-into-live-action remakes! — followed by The Aristocats, Hercules and Bambi. Oh deer.

Lilo & Stitch. Directed by Dean Fleischer Camp. Starring Maia Kealoha, Sydney Agudong, and Chris Sanders. Opens May 23 in cinemas.