Lilo & Stitch (2025 | USA | 108 minutes | Dean Fleischer Camp)
Lilo (Maia Kealoha) is a precocious little girl who might want to be good, but doesn’t really bother trying that hard. She and her older sister Nani (Sydney Agudong) recently lost their parents which left them to fend for themselves. Barely of age, Nani is struggling to keep a job that pays the bills while Lilo seems to get into trouble non-stop. Meanwhile, an alien on the run from intergalactic law crash-lands on the Hawaiian island where Lilo calls home. Looking for a friend, she visits the dog pound where she finds the furry blue alien dubbing him Stitch and taking him home. Will her new pets presence add a source of comfort or add to the chaos… looks like it might be both.
If you’ve seen the animated feature by Disney released in 2002, then you already know the plot for this version of Lilo & Stitch, no surprises in store. It’s another in a slate of films where they’ve attempted to rely mostly on nostalgia an curiosity to get folks into theaters or on VOD a little later. While I’m not exactly on board with the live action train, admittedly I enjoyed myself throughout the nearly two hour run time.
Films like this tend to fall in the trap of too much cheese and not enough realistic reactions and dialog from the human performers (as opposed to AI/special effects characters). Nani’s Agudong was impressively down to earth and expressive as the older sister stuck in an impossible and heartbreaking situation. Right beside her Lilo’s Maia created a rich portrayal of the beloved trouble-maker impressively at the young age of nine. While her character was meant to be six, Maia’s emotional intelligence and energetic spirit were necessary to create a convincing role in little Lilo and convince us she did.
What was hard for me following along with the story of these two sisters, was the reality of the situation. Watching an animated film helps relieve a lot of the heartache of the disastrous situations that Disney films often contain. Seeing real people in these roles breathes life, and in turn pain, into the narrative that had tears rolling down my face at times (I kept saying to myself “why am I crying!?”, definitely surprised me). It also put into sharp focus the sheer magnitude of destruction that Stitch leaves in his wake. Annoyingly they didn’t address the cost of reconstruction at the end despite the hardship it must have created, but that kind of magical fix when that the story is nearly over is a classic Disney cop out.
I digress and leave you with this last observation. In the past, it’s been pretty obvious that a computer-generated character is placed into the film after the human actors have completed their part. Either the interactions are slightly off or an actor isn’t looking directly at their imagined cohort, etc etc. This time, the physical exchanges between computer-generated characters and humans look nearly flawless. It helps to keep you in the moment, and while it isn’t so convincing you’ll forget Stitch isn’t real, it definitely lends a sense of realism that makes watching it way more fun.
Lilo & Stitch arrives in theaters on Friday 5/23