'Lilo & Stitch': The biggest changes from Disney's original movie

USA Today

23-05-2025

'Lilo & Stitch': The biggest changes from Disney's original movie
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Young new star, Maia Kealoha joins Stitch from 'Lilo & Stitch'
Hollywood's newest young star, Maia Kealoha, joins Stitch in studio to talk new remake 'Lilo & Stitch'
Spoiler alert! We're discussing major plot details from Disney's live-action "Lilo & Stitch." Beware if you haven't seen it yet.
On paper, a fragile-voiced mollusk and a calamitous blue alien have very little in common.
But the parallels are obvious to director Dean Fleischer Camp, who is following up his 2022 Oscar-nominated "Marcel the Shell With Shoes On" with Disney's live-action remake of "Lilo & Stitch" (in theaters now).
'They're both unique protagonists who are looking for their place – and their people – in this world that wasn't really made for them,' Camp says. 'Even though they're adorable and funny, they have this quiet well of sadness that is very emotional.'
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"Lilo" charts the unlikely bond between a lonely, 6-year-old Hawaiian girl (Maia Kealoha) and her pet extraterrestrial Stitch, whom she adopts from a dog shelter after he crash-lands on Earth.
The new movie has all the Elvis songs and droll one-liners that you love, but with a bevy of notable changes that die-hard Disney fans will catch as well. Here are some of the major differences in the big-screen update:
Lilo's big sister, Nani, has an expanded backstory
When we meet the unruly Lilo, she is being raised by her 19-year-old sister, Nani (Sydney Agudong), after their parents died. The new movie fleshes out Nani considerably: Once a star student and athlete, she has now shelved her college dreams of studying marine biology so that she can work and raise Lilo.
'In a live-action film, you do have a responsibility to deepen the stakes,' Camp says. 'I feel a lot of things for Nani. The original doesn't go that deeply into it, but this poor girl was essentially forced to be a teen mom at this time in her life when all of her friends would be graduating high school and dating and thinking about their futures. She had to put all of that on hold, so it felt like a really rich character to invest in.'
The aliens Jumba and Pleakley appear human for most of the movie
Stitch, otherwise known as Experiment 626, is pursued by fellow aliens Jumba (Zach Galifianakis) and Pleakley (Billy Magnussen), who have been sent to retrieve him after he escapes from another galaxy. In the animated film, Jumba and Pleakley don a variety of disguises – glasses, sunhats, dresses ‒ as they covertly traipse about Hawaii. But in the live-action movie, the characters simply assume human form when they arrive on Earth.
As fun as it might be to watch computer-generated aliens in drag, Camp worried that audiences wouldn't buy it.
"We wrote these roles for Zach and Billy, and you do want to see them," Camp says. Also, the goal of this adaptation was "to tell a more emotional story of these human sisters, and if we go too clownish with this or that, does it undermine the stakes?"
Pudge no longer eats peanut butter sandwiches
The animated film opens with Lilo delivering a peanut butter sandwich to a fish named Pudge, who lives in the ocean. ("Pudge controls the weather," she explains in an oft-quoted scene.) But as eagle-eyed viewers might notice, the sandwich only has lettuce and tomato in the live-action movie.
'Peanut butter didn't read very well underwater,' Camp says, laughing. 'The process of adapting one of these films thoughtfully is taking every piece that you like from the original and saying, 'Does that work in live action? And if not, what is something that has the same essence?'"
The live-action 'Lilo & Stitch' movie strives for Hawaiian authenticity
Both movies feature intermittent cutaways to an unnamed man who drops his dessert whenever he encounters Lilo and other alien shenanigans. Although that's mint chocolate-chip ice cream in the original "Lilo," the treat has been changed to a multihued Hawaiian shave ice in the 2025 film.
'Part of the opportunity of adapting into live action is to make a more authentic depiction of Hawaii,' Camp says. 'We worked with a lot of consultants. The shave ice was actually the idea of our writer, Chris Bright, who's Hawaiian. He was just like, 'Shave ice? Everywhere on the island. Ice cream? Not so much.''
The new character Tūtū is introduced in the 2025 film
Bright also pulled from his lived experience growing up in Hawaii for the movie's new characters. The live-action film introduces Tūtū (Amy Hill), Lilo and Nani's elderly neighbor who becomes a surrogate mother of sorts after their parents' deaths.
"Chris was just like, 'If this really did happen, where these girls were orphaned, they're in Hawaii. They wouldn't just be abandoned by all their friends and neighbors,'" Camp recalls. "There would be a real effort to try and support them after this tragedy, so it was his idea to introduce that character."
Cobra Bubbles is now two different characters
In the animated movie, Cobra Bubbles was a former CIA agent-turned-social worker. But here, he's effectively been split up into two distinct characters: a federal agent named Cobra (Courtney B. Vance), and a social worker named Mrs. Kekoa (Tia Carrere), who warns Nani that Lilo will be taken from her if she can't hold down a job.
"In order to buy these two girls getting separated in a live-action movie, you couldn't really have the representative of that antagonistic force be a comically huge guy with tattoos on his knuckles, who for some reason is also a social worker," Camp says.
Carrere voiced Nani in the animated movie, which gives her scenes with Agudong a "metatextual" layer, Camp adds. "This grown-up Nani, with all her wisdom, is now advising a younger version of herself. It's beautiful."