Lilo & Stitch (dir. Dean Fleischer Camp)

by Jack Martin | May 21, 2025

Certificate: U

Running Time: 108 mins

UK Distributor: Disney

UK Release Date: 21 May 2025

WHO’S IN LILO & STITCH?

Maia Kealoha, Chris Sanders, Sydney Elizebeth Agudong, Zach Galifianakis, Billy Magnussen, Kaipo Dudoit, Tia Carrere, Courtney B. Vance, Hannah Waddingham, Amy Hill, Jason Scott Lee

WHO’S BEHIND THE CAMERA?

Dean Fleischer Camp (director), Chris Kekaniokalani Bright and Mike Van Waes (writers), Jonathan Eirich and Dan Lin (producers), Dan Romer (composer), Nigel Bluck (cinematographer), Phillip J. Bartell (editor)

WHAT’S IT ABOUT?

A young girl (Kealoha) adopts a chaotic alien experiment (Sanders)…

WHAT ARE MY THOUGHTS ON LILO & STITCH?

The recent financial and critical underperformance of Snow White may finally have broken Disney’s curse of live-action remakes, with many of the other in-development retreads now reportedly either on hold or scrapped entirely as the studio (hopefully) starts to recognise that maybe making largely soulless copies of their animated hits and plopping them into cinemas, instead of Disney+ where many of them belong, isn’t such a great idea after all.

Funnily enough, their latest live-action take on Lilo & Stitch was originally bound for the studio’s streaming service, like Pinocchio and Lady and the Tramp before it, but that was before they perhaps realised the marketing power of its latter title character, who since his debut in the 2002 animated original has become one of the most recognisable and even most adored characters in modern Disney history. You can tell that’s what Disney is banking on here, for despite a decent amount of heart retained from the original, the film struggles to differentiate itself enough from a movie that’s barely old enough to drink in the very state that it’s set in.

The film, from director Dean Fleischer Camp of Marcel the Shell with Shoes On fame, wastes no time getting the plot underway, with the anarchic, blue-furred alien experiment 626 (voiced by Chris Sanders, reprising his role from the original) quickly escaping intergalactic custody and stealing a space cruiser headed toward Earth, eventually landing on one of the Hawaiian Islands. There, he disguises himself as a dog and is promptly adopted by Lilo (Maia Kealoha), a lonely six-year-old girl whose eccentricity matches the chaotic energy of her new dog – newly named Stitch – which doesn’t exactly help her older sister and legal guardian Nani (Sydney Elizebeth Agudong), who’s on the verge of losing Lilo to social services. As Lilo and her new pet begin to bond and teach each other the importance of “ohana”, Stitch is also pursued by his alien creator Jumba (Zach Galifianakis) and his reluctant sidekick, planet expert Pleakley (Billy Magnussen), as well as CIA agent Cobra Bubbles (Courtney B. Vance) who seeks to contain the extraterrestrial threat.

Many of the problems from past live-action remakes are present here also, including a fervent need to recreate or recontextualise memorable scenes and dialogue from the animated original, even if they don’t really make sense in this new context, as well as expanding upon certain story elements that frankly never needed to be expanded upon. Some changes are for the better, including a reworked climax that removes a rather unnecessary last-minute villain and gives that role to a figure whose antagonism is more understandable, but for the most part you’re thinking much more about how the original did most of these elements more effectively, not to mention with stronger humour and of course some exceptional animation that included watercolour backgrounds and bubbly character designs. Replacing all of that with a more photorealistic aesthetic garners mixed results, for while the effects used to create Stitch and other alien creatures are fairly good, and at the very least look a hell of a lot better that what they did to the dwarfs in that recent Snow White movie, it also subtracts much of the simple visual charm from that hand-crafted world of the original (though in fairness, you could say that about any other Disney remake), rendering it less interesting from a visual perspective.

The film also has a strange problem with pacing, for even with an extra 20 minutes to work with, it rushes through vital set-ups with somehow less development than they were given in the more compact original. Director Camp speeds through a number of early scenes that feel as though you’re the Road Runner on an extortionate sugar rush, pushing character dynamics and plot establishments largely to the side for an all-too breezy recreation of the previously animated moments. It’s to a point where you wonder if the director is well aware of how familiar the audience is with the original, and therefore doesn’t need to reintroduce such components to viewers who are already familiar with this narrative, but in doing so his film not only fails to stand firmly on its own but also comes off as a rushed rehash, one that nixes much of the charm and careful plotting that the original in favour of simply doing what came before, but not as effectively.

Where the film does shine is in its fairly sweet nature, and a bulk of that comes from young Maia Kealoha, who brings a fiery energy to Lilo that retains the character’s quirky nature while still feeling like a regular kid with a mischievous side. Her believable relationship with older sister Nani, a highlight of the original, is also kept intact and manages to generate some nice, gentle moments that give extra emotional weight to these characters. And of course, Stitch is a chaotic delight, his adorable design faithfully rendered in addition to leaning hard into his destructively naughty behaviour in ways that will delight younger viewers and make some of the older ones feel nostalgic.

But as we know too well from these live-action remakes, nostalgia can only take it so far. As with the majority of these movies, Lilo & Stitch is a version of the animated original that simply exists, and nothing else. It does what it says on the tin, for better or worse, and leaves your mind as soon as it ends, with no other function than to generate its studio a ton of money. Call it a cynical opinion, but that’s exactly what most of these movies are, and if the reports about Snow White killing this trend for good are to be believed, hopefully this is one of the last ones we’ll ever have to be subjected to. Though if that is indeed the case, at least it’s not among the worst ones.

SO, TO SUM UP…

Lilo & Stitch is yet another live-action Disney remake that carries many of the same issues such as nostalgia-baiting redundancy and a mixed transition from the arguably more alive animation to a less visually interesting and oddly paced photorealistic aesthetic, but it retains enough of the original’s heart for it to be a serviceable, if ultimately needless, recreation.