"Lilo and Stitch" -The Hunger For Substantive Children's Films Has Never Been Stronger

I’m still riding the high of hearing that American cinemas just came off of the most profitable Memorial Day Weekend at the movies since 2013. This is a major win for theatrical distribution, and has made my cold, cynical heart melt just a little bit more. It is arguable whether or not we should be celebrating this win on the basis of yet another live-action remake, but thankfully Lilo and Stitch is the first one of these schlock-fests since 2017 that didn’t send me out of the theater in a white-hot rage. 

What separates Lilo and Stitch apart from the vast majority of these other outings is that the story at play here lends itself decently well to the live-action medium; not nearly as well as it does to animation of course, but there was a fair amount of room to play here. Being set in present-day Hawaii with only minor cutaways to extraterrestrial settings, and all but a few of the main characters being real-tangible human beings, there isn’t much room to totally botch the visual. They come close a few times, but they never go full Snow White. Visually the film pales in comparison to the original, which was always a given, but there is a commendable effort.

Newcomer, Maia Kealoha is a future star in the making. She does sensational work for her first performance, and at such a young age. Everyone else in the film does serviceable work, but no other performance struck me as particularly memorable or original. Stitch himself looks spectacular, and the rest of our CGI cast isn’t half-bad either (for once). Strangely the best editing in the film occurs in the sequences that involve full CGI shots. They’re paced with the most fluid “camera” movement, the timing is great, and different angles are utilized appropriately and add a lot to the frenetic comedy.

 Unfortunately, I have to argue the opposite for most of the other scenes in the film. It often feels as if not enough coverage was shot for each angle, because for simple uncomplicated setups, the editing is far too awkward and sharp to soak in any of the story. There is never any rhythm to it all, and each new angle is as unpredictable as the last, and it never feels earned, or well-prepared.

Since 2022’s Avatar: The Way Of Water no big, blockbuster film has any excuse to make underwater sequences look dull. There aren’t very many in this film, but the ones that are there are perhaps the most visually flat in the film. It’s often clear that there is actually very little water on set, and it’s mostly a wire-blue-screen setup, and the animals supposedly swimming alongside our characters are the fakest looking ones in the film. This is an issue that Disney’s remake of The Little Mermaid suffered from greatly as well, of all projects. 

The few genuine strengths here are to the credit of director Dean Fleischer Camp of Marcel the Shell With Shoes On. The film has a relatively tight pace of 108 minutes, twenty minutes longer than the original, but for the most part the pacing works. The second act does struggle with repetitive sequences, but the film never feels like it overstays its welcome. This is far more than I can say of previous iterations of these movies, and I know that it sounds like I’m praising the bare minimum here, but whether we like it or not, this is the current standard of children’s entertainment…which is I think the greater issue at hand here. 

At my screening, there was a major struggle to play age appropriate movie trailers in the twenty minutes before the film began. There were two separate trailers for Pixar’s upcoming Elio, as well as an additional trailer for the very film we were all sat down to see, mixed in between commercials for Allstate Insurance and Vitamin Water.

How can we get mad at the box office returns for films like this when studios are far more concerned with satisfying the nostalgia of 20-40 year olds, and forgetting to actually make substantive content for the people that will be their proper money makers in less than a decade? Of course these movies are going to smash records. They’re the only things children can watch in the theater, and most of their parents have nostalgia for the original anyway!

A lot of what I’m arguing here is old news, and far from revolutionary, but we’re directing our energy at the wrong source. We need to channel this anger at our fellow moviegoers into championing other artists, and even ourselves. Studios obviously won’t listen if their numbers are up, and what else are parents supposed to do? 

Enough “viva la revolucion!” talks for one review. I tolerated Lilo and Stitch, and I certainly don’t blame anyone else for doing so either. I wouldn’t even call it a good movie, but at least this is the first “live-action remake” from Disney in a long time that actually feels as if the people making it legitimately enjoyed themselves while doing it.