Release Date: June 21, 2002
The Voices of: Daveigh Chase, Tia Carrere, Chris Sanders, Ving Rhames, David Ogden Stiers, Kevin McDonald, Jason Scott Lee
Directed by: Chris Sanders, Dean DeBlois
Written by: Chris Sanders, Dean DeBlois
Distributed by: Buena Vista Pictures
MPAA Rating: PG (mild sci-fi action/violence)
Disney’s history of summertime animated hits is a most prestigious lineage, and for 2002, the animation wizards came up with a little blue furball of an alien named Stitch as part of the leading dynamic duo in Lilo & Stitch. Following in Ice Age director Chris Wedge’s footsteps, co-director Chris Sanders lends his voice to Stitch as well as his considerable creative talents to fill the sudden demand for cute, incoherent cartoon characters. But with an even mixture of laughs and more somber moments, Sanders and fellow helmer Dean DeBlois have created a surefire family favorite.
While technically Stitch doesn’t follow the traditional line of Disney films, the same narrative blueprint is still in use, taking a little something from The Lion King and Mulan. However, the film stepped a little too far off this familiar line at times and subsequently never really created its own identity.
One thing Disney seems to be going after of late is the older audience, who for a long time were being dragged to these films by the more directly targeted youngsters -- but now find themselves coming willingly and eager. 2000’s The Emperor’s New Groove gave Disney and traditional animation a hip, new look that both young and old can enjoy, and Lilo & Stitch capitalizes on a similar note.
Allow me to introduce you to the title characters. On a distant planet far from Earth, a mad scientist, Jumba (voiced by David Ogden Stiers), creates the most ruthless little monster, Experiment 626 -- better known as Stitch (voiced by Sanders). Ruled dangerous by the United Federation of Planets, Jumba is locked up and Stitch sentenced to be marooned on a desert asteroid.
But the relentless Stitch escapes and crashes his stolen spaceship on one of the Hawaiian Islands, where he is adopted from an animal shelter by Lilo (voiced by Daveigh Chase) -- a mischievous 5-year-old Hawaiian girl who befriends odd animals and takes peculiar pictures to cope with her loneliness. Lilo lives with her sister, Nani (voiced by Tia Carrere), who is battling a mysteriously ominous social worker, Cobra Bubbles (voiced by Ving Rhames), for custody over the child. The adventures begin when aliens tracking Stitch land on Earth and threaten to disrupt the delicate balance of Lilo’s family.
Sanders, who also wrote the script for 1998’s Mulan, has inflected this original premise with the familiar family themes, and there is an obvious emphasis on Stitch being the alien incarnation of the Ugly Duckling. This brings out the movie’s more somber moments that worked, but at the same time seemed out of place in the picture as a whole.
Deblois and Sanders took the best parts of Disney films past and tweaked them to fit Lilo & Stitch. Sanders’s opening title sequence mirrors the one in The Lion King -- where he worked on as a production designer. Which is interesting, because The Lion King was the first Disney film to step outside of the tradition of the typical fairy-tale classics, and Lilo goes this route even further by ditching the musical numbers. The only musical accompaniment is Alan Silvestri’s beautiful score; a few songs over montages; and the vocal stylings of Elvis Presley (incidentally, Lilo is a huge Elvis fan).
The colorful characters helped in unveiling the premise. Daveigh Chase, who is mostly known for her work in television, gives life to Lilo and inhabits the troubled 5-year old -- her bickering with Tia Carrere, as Lilo’s older sister Nani, looks like the real thing that sisters in the audience probably know too well.
The majority of the laughs, as usual, come by way of the supporting characters, like the stone-cold Ving Rhames as the ex-CIA social worker or Jumba’s sidekick, Pleakley, voiced by comic veteran Kevin McDonald (TV’s “Kids in the Hall”). Stitch is a character all its own and viewers will actually find themselves feeling for the destructive, mostly mute or otherwise incoherent extraterrestrial.
Art director Ric Sluiter (Mulan) gave Disney films one more makeover but still retained some of the washed-out watercolor backdrops of yesteryear. While the rich colors, especially in the blues and reds, vividly enlivened everything from outer space to the Hawaiian Islands, some of the human artistry was a little rough and disproportionate.
Still, Lilo & Stitch is definitely a fun picture that the whole family can enjoy. It’s not the best of Disney, but somewhere in the middle between classic Disney and neo-hip Disney. While the same kooky characters and sidekicks are resplendent and quite funny, the film’s story and style lacked a certain rhythm throughout. As always, the film has the valuable emphasis of the importance of family, especially when choosing your company to watch this movie.
all contents © 2002 Michael J. Eiff