Back up the money truck: Lilo & Stitch remake dumbs down a masterpiece

CBC

23-05-2025

In deciding whether 2002's Lilo & Stitch or the new CGI-aided remake might be more enjoyable to sit down and watch, we surprisingly have a sort of case study to refer back to.
It can be found in one of the strangest cases of accidental plagiarism in history: the fact that the world has two iterations of Dennis the Menace.
One is likely the version you know: the happy-go-lucky, tow-headed, ham-armed little boy of the Hank Ketcham comic strip that debuted in the U.S. in March of 1951. The other is a slightly less adorable, slightly more gritty export from the U.K. Also debuting in a comic strip, almost unbelievably on the exact same day under the exact same name, this Dennis is a perhaps more honest illustration of the motivations behind — and outlook for — a boy who routinely commits borderline felonies.
While the American Dennis would innocently eat a few more cookies than his mom would like, his grimacing English cousin would saw a table in half just because he was bored.
How realistically either portray the inner workings of children is up for debate — especially given how the former potentially helped destroy the life of the boy upon whom it was based.
But what's obvious is which version had more universal appeal. While U.K. Dennis may enjoy more popularity in his native England (under the title Dennis & Gnasher), Ketcham's franchise has spawned at least three movies, three TV shows and an ongoing comic strip that at one time was syndicated in 48 countries and 19 languages.
Perhaps most importantly, Ketcham's was the one that ended up keeping the name.
WATCH | Lilo & Stitch trailer:
This is not to say the relative differences found within these two pop culture pairs are identical. We have more than a 20-year separation between the two versions of Lilo & Stitch. And Disney's newest version of the Hawaii-set family fable is not, like with Dennis, an accidental remake.
But particularly when comparing this animated outing with its live-action afterbirth, Lilo & Stitch 's parallel productions do have something in common with the Menaces. While the 2002 feature depicted its alien anti-hero as a loveable, huggable little brother, 2025's Stitch is a bit more like the one sawing the table in half.
Similar story
That's despite the fact that, outside of a slightly extended opening that sets us up for a generally more juvenile tone (buckle up for the first of many, many mucus-based jokes), this Lilo & Stitch sticks quite closely to the original. Or at least it appears to.
It includes visual gags that operate almost like shot-for-shot remakes. We still follow Lilo Pelekai (Maia Kealoha), a little girl growing up on the island of Kauaʻi, plagued by a mischievous streak. Her parents have still recently passed, leaving her big sister Nani (Sydney Agudong) responsible for Lilo, their surprisingly huge house and the multiple jobs she must work to keep it all afloat.
Meanwhile, we still see Stitch — an illegal alien-experiment gone wrong — escape from the galactic federation, crash-land on Earth and eventually get scooped up from the pound by Lilo, who mistakes him for an ugly dog.
And we still see fraying, mended and fraying-again relationships as the thematic centrepiece. Nani is too young to take care of Lilo, but Lilo is too young for Nani to let her go. Lilo is still too impulsive, destructive and odd to make friends, but also too free-spirited, unique and sincere to betray her true self. And Stitch is still the dangerous, growling beast we know and love from any modern animal movie — the kind of irredeemable life-destroyer in everything from War Horse to Because of Wynn-Dixie to Marley and Me that, despite bringing nothing but destruction and hardship to a family on its last legs, is inexplicably defended to the end.
That said, it's a winning formula. Here, everyone's beset by conflicting character traits that are neither truly good nor truly bad — and that are both helpful and destructive in different settings.
When the social worker assigned to manage their case (Ving Rhames's hulking Cobra Bubbles in the original, a slightly less incongruously interesting Tia Carrere as Mrs. Kekoa in the remake) tells Nani to give up Lilo, it is tragic — but not necessarily unfair. Departing from the cookie-cutter and censor-safe children's stories Canadians are used to, there's little stock invested in a singular and simple big-bad to rail against, which makes it all the more refreshingly real.
But here, a different kind of real is also one of the main problems: the always uncanny nature of converting hand-drawn art to a combination of human actors and computer graphics. While Kealoha gives a fantastic performance, being a human, her actions are necessarily slower and more sluggish — making the recreated visual gags work infinitely less well in a medium they were never designed for.
And when we get to the abomination that is Stitch, we are immediately confronted with the shortcomings of a more realistic Menace. In cartoon form, our alien little buddy spitting green liquid has none of the unsettling realities of the remake's hyper-detailed phlegm physics; it is much easier to feel attached to our blue ball of mayhem when his tendency to lick out the contents of his own nose is not rendered in graphic 4K format.
But what's actually more disappointing is the ways in which the new Lilo & Stitch has decided to kiddify the story.
While the 2002 film was sanitized from its intended scope (a scene criticizing American tourists was cut, Lilo hiding in a laundry machine was changed to hiding in a pizza box and a finale involving an airplane crash was revised to avoid 9/11 comparisons), it still managed an engagingly mature tone.
Aside from the moral grey areas — and the gorgeous hand-drawn art style that nearly relaunched the medium, obviously entirely absent here — the original Lilo & Stitch operated as both a cultural commentary and almost a capital-D drama.
Lilo's obsession with Elvis as a "model citizen" and the farmer-tanned white tourists — both largely absent in the remake — added at least a subtextual commentary on Hawaii's cannibalized culture and connection to America at large.
Cobra Bubbles's much more domineering presence in the first movie contributed to a darker and more realistic threat to Lilo and Nani's continued relationship — all supported by generally more mature dialogue instead of the lighter tone of the remake.
In the new version, when the two aliens tasked with recapturing Stitch — Pleakley (Billy Magnussen) and Jumba (an unrecognizable Zach Galifianakis) make their entrance, the regression is obvious. Where 2002's Pleakley was objectively obsessed with feminine fashion — disguising himself in wigs, makeup and dresses — the new Pleakley opts to dress little more garishly than an H&M bargain-bin hunter.
Granted, a drag-less alien is unlikely to draw complaints from the core audience of five-year-olds. But given the fact that director Dean Fleischer Camp reportedly tried to include a dress-wearing Pleakley and was shut down, it works as a good metaphor for what is wrong with the remake in the first place.
Regarded in a vacuum, 2025's Lilo & Stitch is fine, and likely to entertain the littles. But compared to a stimulating, genre-defining, all-ages masterpiece from two decades ago, it's nothing but demoralizing. Where once we could expect to move forward with our movies, Lilo & Stitch shows we'd rather just make them brighter and dumber.