Why Gantu Isn't In The Lilo & Stitch Remake

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7 days ago

🚨 Warning: Major spoilers ahead. 🚨
There's a significant change in Disney's live-action Lilo & Stitch that some people might have difficulty coming to terms with, and I get it.
There's Lilo and Nani.
Of course, there's Stitch.
Pleakly and Jumba are present.
There's even the Grand Councilwoman!
But there's no Gantu.
🚨 Spoilers Ahead 🚨
In the live-action Lilo & Stitch, the main antagonist is no longer Captain Gantu, but instead Jumba (Zach Galifianakis), hellbent on capturing his rogue experiment for his evil galactic domination plot.
Remember when Captain Gantu captured Lilo and Stitch, and instead of letting Gantu die after he rescued Lilo, Stitch saved Gantu, too, and we all started crying? Yeah, that's not happening in this version.
Director Dean Fleischer Camp explained to Entertainment Weekly why they made this big change from the original movie. "Something that live-action films do by virtue of taking place in reality is that they are already more grounded," Dean said to the publication. "If you have a story like Lilo & Stitch that does actually have this pretty terrestrial drama between the sisters and staying together, you can actually do them a greater service in a live-action movie. You can make those relationships deeper, hopefully more emotionally resonant."
We've seen these types of changes before in Disney live-action remakes. Remember when Mushu and Cricket were completely missing from the live-action Mulan?
Lilo & Stitch decided to keep all the other aliens except one. Poor Gantu.
In addition to Gantu's omission, there was a big change with Cobra Bubbles being a very intimidating social worker and an obvious homage to Ving Rhames's Pulp Fiction character, Marcellus Wallace.
"You end up thinking about how it is a very different experience to see an actual 6-year-old girl potentially being threatened with being torn from her caregiver sister after grieving the loss of their parents," Dean said. "That is a very different kind of responsibility from a filmmaking perspective than what you can get away with in an animated film."
In the new film, Cobra Bubbles is just a CIA agent, and his role as Lilo's social worker was given to the new character Mrs. Kekoa (played by Tia Carrere, the voice of Nani from the animated film).
"If the dramatic stakes of Lilo is that she's going to get separated from her sister, then you need a person who actually services those stakes in a credible way," Dean continued. "You can get away with that being Cobra Bubbles in an animated film — a 6-foot-5 huge dude with 'Cobra' tattooed on his knuckles is somehow a social worker in that world."
Big, tall, scary dudes like Gantu and animated Bubbles are apparently "too much live-action.
So, if there's no Gantu, that means that somebody has to take his place as the movie's antagonist. "One of the things I loved about the original is that up until Gantu arrives, there is no villain that is just a villain," Dean said. "Gantu arrives and it turns into a more conventional movie. I thought there was a nice opportunity here for [Jumba] to turn and become the villain in the third act."
"To create real estate for all that emotional stuff and the deepening that we did, you have to get rid of stuff. And so Gantu was a casualty of that, but one that I felt pretty confident about from a storytelling perspective," Dean continued.
You might want to know that Gantu did exist in the live-action version at one point, but Dean elected for the change according to producer Jonathan Eirich. "We did have it in at one point," he told EW. "In part because you're following certain aspects of the original movie and you're like, 'Oh, well of course Gantu has to be in this. It was really to Dean's credit that he challenged the idea of, 'Well, does he have to? Could it be somebody else who has a more personal connection?'"
With Gantu out, Lilo & Stitch's producer said it felt more "fertile from a story perspective" to make Jumba the big bad in Act 3, noting that his relationship with Stitch as a "deliquent father figure" amplified the overall theme of the new movie.
Changes are expected in the live-action remakes of Disney films, but since Gantu is a character who plays a huge part in the Lilo & Stitch universe, I feel it necessary to defend his presence in the series. Gantu may have been an antagonist to some degree in the 2002 Lilo & Stitch, but was he really a villain? Not necessarily.
Gantu represented the original movie's conflict of obedience, law and order, and doing things "by the book." He was following orders, something every character (besides Lilo and Stitch) did in the original movie.
Cobra Bubbles tried to follow the rules as a social worker and former CIA agent.Nani tried to follow the rules as a big sister and a caregiver.And Gantu tried to capture Stitch (yes, recklessly) because he was technically a wanted criminal in the galaxy, so let's give the Galactic Federation Captain some grace.
Now, Dr. Hämsterviel? That's a real villain right there. IYKYK.
Justice for Captain Gantu!
Read the full interview with Dean Fleischer Camp here.
What do you think about the changes to Lilo & Stitch?