The reputational damage Primark has done to Disney’s Lilo & Stitch is borderline obscene. Go back to the 2002 original and you’ll find it to be an animated masterpiece, with the first use of watercolour backgrounds at the studio in six decades, where the foam kiss of Hawaii’s waves crash against hazy pink sunsets. A blue-furred, bulldog-adjacent alien, eventually named Stitch, crash-lands on Earth and bonds with a troubled little girl, Lilo Pelekai. He questions what his purpose is, whether there’s anything to him beyond destruction. In short, it’s Frankenstein with a happy ending.
Exhaustive merchandising, though, has since overwritten Stitch as the non-consenting emblem of millennial cringe – something along the lines of him, half-lidded and unimpressed, clutching a steaming mug above the caption “don’t talk to me before my coffee”. It’s no surprise, then, to see the Disney live-action remake machine render him in spiritless CGI, or to see it butcher his character arc in favour of an extended sequence of him driving around in a little pink car, or farting in a punch bowl, all so audiences can slap their knees and call him a cheeky little rascal. If it sounds like there’s a streak of bitterness there, I won’t deny it (I’m aware it isn’t standard practice to claim Lilo & Stitch is a covert adaptation of Mary Shelley’s masterwork).
The flattening of Stitch into a blander, more marketable product is business as usual for Disney, and it’s only grown increasingly obvious now that the studio’s reviving a barely 25-year-old film. Lilo, an orphan, and her big sister and carer Nani (the pair are played in this version by Maia Kealoha and Sydney Elizebeth Agudong) were already as self-possessed as Disney heroines get. No changes to be made there.
While the original film was written and directed by non-Hawaiians (Chris Sanders, also the voice of Stitch in all his screen excursions, and Dean DeBlois), the remake is directed by a non-Hawaiian, Dean Fleischer Camp, and co-written by a Hawaiian, Chris Kekaniokalani Bright. But there’s nothing here that suggests a deeper sense of place and culture, and the running joke in which Lilo takes pictures of tourists as payback for the way they treat her as an attraction has, with depressing expectability, been excised (Disney has since opened its own resort on the island of Oahu). There have been accusations of colourism, too, with some of the remake’s casting choices.
With nothing to revamp, Lilo & Stitch instead creates brand new problems for itself. Someone must have suggested having a surly undercover CIA agent (originally voiced by Ving Rhames, here played by Courtney B Vance) as Lilo’s social worker reflected poorly on the system’s vetting process. And so he’s been stripped of his covert identity, and replaced by a more kindly social worker (Tia Carrere, the original voice of Nani).
Extraterrestrial Earth expert Pleakley, sent alongside Stitch’s creator Dr Jumba to recover the pint-sized menace, no longer explores his gender identity via emotional attachment to his human disguise, a woman’s brown bobbed wig (it’s a sweet throughline in the original, turning Pleakley into an unexpected queer icon). Instead, he (Billy Magnussen) and Jumba (Zach Galifianakis) rely on holographic projections of real humans to blend in, with human Pleakley given a mesh shirt to compensate.
These half-hearted substitutions prove entirely pointless in practice, shot and cobbled together as they are with the hasty quality of a reality TV show. Yet cuteness sells, and Lilo & Stitch is already looking to make a killing at the box office. And who will be rubbing their hands with glee at that news? Primark, no doubt.
Dir: Dean Fleischer Camp. Starring: Sydney Elizebeth Agudong, Billy Magnussen, Hannah Waddingham, Chris Sanders, Courtney B Vance, Zach Galifianakis, Maia Kealoha. Cert U, 108 minutes
‘Lilo & Stitch’ is in cinemas from 21 May
