Your Nerd Side Review Lilo and Stitch

Dean Fleischer Camp, director of Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, used the sweetness in his catalog to his advantage with Stitch (voiced again by Chris Sanders). Our beloved Experiment 626 is cute and fluffy and what makes the live-action remake worth it boils down to Stitch’s relationship with Lilo (Maia Kealoha). Kealoha’s performance as the rambunctious 6 year-old who just wants friends is so adorable that you want nothing more than for Lilo and Stitch to run around Hawai’i together the entire movie.

Unlike the animated, Lilo is less angry towards Stitch. Her entire world is centered around the fact that her wish on a “shooting star” came true. That wish, of course, being wished upon Stitch’s ship crashing to Earth.

Even Stitch’s fellow aliens in Pleakley (Billy Magnussen) and Jumba (Zach Galifianakis) are less terrifying and more just weird and, well, “alien” in the film. And with the lack of Captain Gantu, the alien that looks like a shark and terrified me as a kid, it made this just a fun Hawaiian roller-coaster ride.

This is how you do a live-action remake!

The art of the Disney animated to live-action remakes hasn’t been the smoothest journey. Some are better than others but for the most part, none have touched the original films. As someone who doesn’t like Cinderella as a story, I liked the live-action more but that’s neither here nor there. The point is that the live-action remakes aren’t necessarily the most interesting things that Disney has done.

Lilo & Stitch is changing that though. It understands that many of us have a deep love for the animated film and doesn’t aim to change that. It wants you to have fun with Lilo and her blue best friend and makes necessary changes to Nani’s (Sydney Agudong) storyline and gave both Lilo and Nani people around them who showed us as the audience how their Ohana is beautiful, as mixed up and small as it may be.

I loved this movie. It was so sweet and to see how Lilo interacted with Stitch, never yelling at him and saying how she hates him, was a beautiful change that I didn’t know I needed. She showed him compassion and, in turn, it taught Stitch how to love Lilo and her family and I cried every second of this adorable take on many fans favorite Disney movie.