Lilo & Stitch
Lilo & Stitch is, of course, written so that kids may enjoy it, but underneath the family-friendly veneer are unexpectedly dark themes of existentialism, grief, and socioeconomic hardship that are clearly also targeted towards older audiences. Stitch—also known as "Experiment 626" (pronounced "six-two-six")—is a genetic experiment created in a lab by a mad alien scientist named Dr. Jumba Jookiba. As Jumba states during the film, he never intended Stitch to do anything other than wreck things, so when Stitch finds himself in a situation where he has nothing to wreck, he struggles with a lost sense of identity, purpose, and belonging. At the same time, Lilo is a young Hawaiian girl who lives with her sister Nani. At some point before the events of the film, Nani and Lilo lost their parents to a car accident. Nani is left responsible for raising Lilo all on her own, and throughout the film, a social worker is constantly watching and threatening to take Lilo away from her.
The film begins in outer space, where an extraterrestrial galactic-level government called the United Galactic Federation conducts a trial convicting Jumba of "illegal genetic experimentation". Before the sentence is handed down, the grand councilwoman attempts to communicate with the then-unnamed Experiment 626, implying that if the creature could be reasoned with, the council would not have to exile him. 626 responds with the phrase, "Meega nala kweesta," to which all observers in the proceeding immediately cringe, implying it means something vulgar. According to co-director Chris Sanders, who conceived the idea for Lilo & Stitch,
he had originally intended Stitch to be a non-speaking character,
uttering only grunts and snarls. As the story evolved during production,
however, they realized that he needed to say a few things, and by the end, even though Stitch speaks probably less than five times in the entire film, he ends up speaking the most consequential lines of dialogue in the story, as we will later discuss. His first speech in the film, however, is just complete nonsense, reflecting the chaotic and confused nature of his existence at the beginning of the film.
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| Jumba: "So, tell me, my little one-eyed one, on what poor, pitiful, defenseless planet has my monstrosity been unleashed?" Top: The frame immediately preceding the crossfade to Earth. Bottom: The frame immediately afterwards. |
The first ten minutes of the film are set entirely in outer space, and just as you begin to think that's where much of the film might take place, it crossfades to the small Hawaiian island of Kauai, which is in fact the setting of the entire rest of the movie. This is perhaps my favorite scene-to-scene transition in any animated film because it is quite effective at creating a stark juxtaposition between the chaotic science-fiction world of the first ten minutes and the familiar beach setting on Earth. The transition also builds suspense, as it marks the beginning of a 13-minute period during which no aliens appear on-screen, putting the extraterrestrial part of the story on hold. Just before the transition occurs, Jumba asks his companion Pleakley where his genetic experiment escaped to, and the transition itself answers his question.
The transition is reminiscent of the comic formula that I've previously discussed on this blog with respect to Shakespearean comedies: see my 2018 post titled "Shakespearean comedy and Rio". In that post, I pointed out how Shakespearean comedies often follow a particular pattern:
- First, the comedy begins
in a place of rigid rules, oftentimes a court. There, we are introduced
to some kind of social issue that generates conflict between the
characters.
- Once the story completes its exposition, we tend
to see the setting of the story shift to somewhere my Shakespeare
instructor back in 2016 described as the "transformational green space".
This is an area that is separate from where
the story began, and this is where the characters begin to explore and
test the social issue introduced in the exposition. It is a green space because it is often somewhere natural and exotic, like the forest or the jungle.
- Finally, the comedy concludes by resolving the social conflict through a marriage.
Lilo & Stitch
also follows the broad contours of this classic Shakespeare-descended
comic formula. The film clearly begins in a place of rigid rules
(towards the end of the film, a character even remarks that "aliens are
all about rules"), and then it transitions to Hawaii, which is the
"transformational green space" of the comedy. While there is no marriage
at the conclusion of Lilo & Stitch, the film resolves its main conflict through a formal declaration that unites its two title characters for life, as we will later discuss.
The song "He Mele No Lilo" begins playing during the transition from space to Hawaii. The song is entirely in the Hawaiian language. According to this personal website published by someone at MIT, the song is a derivative of a traditional Hawaiian chant called "Mele Inoa no Kalakaua", the original lyrics of which express gratitude towards the chief of a Hawaiian tribe. The use of traditional Hawaiian melodies during these expository scenes further the authenticity of the film's depiction of Hawaiian culture. Indeed, several aspects of native Hawaiian culture later become integral to the development of the story and its characters, and "He Mele No Lilo" serves as the viewer's first glimpse into this rich culture.
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| The artists for Lilo & Stitch painted the backgrounds in watercolor, a style Disney had not used in an animated film for 60 years. |
The artists decided to use watercolor to draw the backgrounds in Lilo & Stitch. This choice is unique for a modern animated film. According to Sanders, while Disney used watercolor extensively during the early days of animation in the 1930s, the practice gave way to the use of gouache paint, which became the standard for hand-drawn animation from the 1940s onward, as well as computer-generated imagery, which was all the rage following Pixar's Toy Story (1995). As the team of artists set out to draw the backgrounds for Lilo & Stitch, they found that they had to rediscover long-lost watercolor techniques that had not been used in almost an entire lifetime. The team, which was based in Florida, flew out to California at one point in order to meet the octogenarian Maurice Noble, one of the few background artists for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) still alive, in order to master his watercolor ways. See this oral history of Lilo & Stitch published on New York magazine's Vulture website.
Following the transition to Earth, the film introduces Lilo as an eccentric young girl who shows up late to her hula class still wet from seawater because she needed to give "Pudge the Fish" a sandwich. When a snobbish classmate named Mertle Edmonds tells her she's crazy, she unhesitatingly attacks her, biting her hand. This is a clear reference to an earlier scene where 626 bit Gantu, the captain of the group of Galactic Federation officers transferring 626: Mertle asks her friends whether her hand looks infected to them, and Gantu had asked the same question to his subordinates. The writers clearly wanted to highlight that Lilo shares some disruptive characteristics with her blue extraterrestrial counterpart.
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| Top: Gantu: "Does this look infected to you?" Bottom: Mertle: "Does this look infected to you?" |
However, whereas up to this point the film has given us no reason to sympathize with the rowdy and destructive Experiment 626, we quickly find reason to sympathize with Lilo: she is an orphan. No character ever explicitly states that her parents are dead; rather, the film makes it evident implicitly. Our first indication comes after Lilo gets kicked out of the hula class because of her behavior: her hula instructor apologetically tells her that he called her sister—we would expect the instructor to be more frustrated and to call Lilo's parents. Later, when Nani arrives at home, an intimidating social worker (voiced by none other than Ving Rhames, who is probably best known as Luther from the Mission Impossible movies—his character model in Lilo & Stitch even looks like Luther) asks Nani if she is the "guardian in question" and inspects Lilo's living conditions, finding that Nani often leaves Lilo home alone with the house in a mess. After Nani and Lilo have a fight with each other, they later reconcile, with Nani apologizing for yelling at Lilo and Lilo responding by saying, "We're sisters. It's our job [to yell at each other]. ... I like you better as a sister than a mom."
Speaking of sisters, before Lilo & Stitch, there did not really exist an animated Hollywood film that focused on the relationship between sisters. Lilo & Stitch was a trailblazer in this respect, paving the way for the same studio to produce the remarkably successful movie Frozen (2013), which was also centrally about the relationship between two sisters.
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| Nani: "I shouldn't have yelled at you." Lilo: "We're sisters. It's our job. ... I like you better as a sister than a mom." |
Up until now, the terrestrial and extraterrestrial storylines have yet to intersect. The story needed to find a way for Lilo to meet Experiment 626. It does so by having Lilo make a wish upon a shooting star (which is actually 626's ship crash-landing on Kauai). "It's me again," she says, with Nani eavesdropping. "I need someone to be my friend. Someone who won't leave me. Maybe send me an angel, the nicest angel you have." To answer Lilo's plea, Nani decides the next day to take Lilo to the dog shelter, figuring a dog would give Lilo the friend she desires. This is the very dog shelter that 626 was taken to after crash-landing and getting run over by trucks. To avoid capture, 626 pretends to be a dog and convinces Lilo to adopt
him at the shelter; he then uses Lilo as a human shield against Jumba, who has agreed to help re-capture the fugitive 626 in exchange for his own freedom.
Additionally, I have some problems with the character of the woman running the dog shelter. Ideally, if you want to adopt a dog, the previous owner should interview you first to make sure you would be a good fit for the dog. Are you financially capable of supporting the dog? Do you understand your obligations for the dog (e.g. walking the dog, feeding it the right food, making sure the dog is healthy)? The dog shelter lady (credited as "Rescue Lady") asks none of this. She allows Lilo to go into the kennel and pick out any dog to adopt for a $2 licensing fee, no questions asked. After Stitch starts barking at Jumba and Pleakley, who hide in the bushes before the humans can see them, the shelter lady squirts a bottle of water at Stitch to get him to stop barking. I am admittedly not an expert, but I am pretty sure this is not the proper way to train a dog behaviorally. Based on my limited understanding, behavioral training for dogs primarily revolves around positive reinforcement through focusing on rewarding good behavior rather than discipline of bad behavior.
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| Lilo: "His name is Stitch." |
Furthermore, when Lilo decides to name her adoptee "Stitch", the shelter lady almost rejects the name, beginning to say, "Now that's not a real name ...", before Nani signals not to question it. In what world is Stitch "not a real name" for a dog? Why shoot down a little girl over something like this? Even before this movie came out in 2002, I am quite sure it would have been entirely acceptable to name a dog "Stitch" (and now that the movie exists, I'm sure there are families out there who decided to name their own furry friends after Lilo's blue friend). The name is significant as symbolism as well. Earlier in the film, as Nani and Lilo reconcile from their fight, Lilo tells Nani, "We're a broken family, aren't we?" Nani reluctantly agrees: "Maybe a little. Maybe a lot." Indeed, the family might be little and broken, but what is a six-letter word for something that can mend tears and heal deep wounds? Ignore the lady, Lilo. "Stitch" is a great name.
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| Jumba: "His destructive programming is taking effect. He will be irresistibly drawn to large cities, where he will back up sewers, reverse street signs, and steal everyone's left shoe." Lilo: "It's nice to live on an island with no large cities." |
During a montage showing Lilo trying to play with Stitch for the first time, the love song "Stuck on You" by Elvis Presley begins playing. Throughout the scene, Jumba and Pleakley follow Stitch closely, and with no means of escaping the island, Stitch is forced to remain with Lilo and continue pretending to be a dog in order to avoid capture. He is, in a certain sense, "stuck on" Lilo. This sort of thematic inclusion of Elvis's music is common throughout the soundtrack of the film, as he is Lilo's favorite musician (and, more importantly, Chris Sanders' as well). Earlier, when Lilo arrives home by herself after getting kicked out of hula class and spurned by her classmates, she throws on Elvis's "Heartbreak Hotel", whose depressing lyrics about loneliness reflect Lilo's mood during that scene. Later in the film, there is a scene where the song "Hound Dog" plays on Lilo's record player, and Jumba, upon hearing it, inexplicably exclaims, "Oh, I love this song!" I guess Elvis's influence extends beyond just the Earth. "Hound Dog" is perhaps one of Elvis's most recognizable songs—a certifiable banger—and it is only natural that they should fit it into a movie in which a character pretends to be a literal hound dog for the majority of it.
Following the "Stuck on You" montage, Lilo and Stitch eat dinner at the restaurant where Nani works. There, we meet David. David's character is a little annoying at first. He keeps trying to ask Nani out, despite Nani making it clear she is not interested in a relationship at this time. Nani and David were voiced by Tia Carrere and Jason Scott Lee, respectively, and both actors grew up in Hawaii as kids. These proved to be excellent casting decisions. Throughout the production of Lilo & Stitch, the writers and directors gave Carrere and Lee wide latitude to adjust the script to fit how Hawaiians would say things in Hawaiian Pidgin. There was one line of dialogue at this restaurant in particular where, according to Lee, the way in which David says, "You sure it's a dog?", when talking about Stitch is "a very Pidgin English kind of thing". This lent the dialogue in the film authenticity and charm that are rather uncommon to find in films set in Hawaii.
It is also at this restaurant where Stitch performs his first altruistic act in the film. After Nani serves two slices of cake as dessert to Lilo and Stitch, Stitch immediately puts both slices in his mouth. When he hears Lilo complain, Stitch stops himself, spits out both slices (plus the cherry), and offers them both back to Lilo. The act still feels in-character for Stitch because it is pretty disgusting—as expected, Lilo reacts with disgust—but it is nevertheless a tiny bit of character development, demonstrating that just being around Lilo for less than a day is already having an effect on Stitch. It is the first baby step towards goodness. It's not enough, however, as Stitch quickly regresses to his destructive tendencies and gets Nani fired.
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| Stitch's first altruistic act of the movie |
When Nani, Lilo, and Stitch return home after their long day, Stitch instantly starts wrecking things—ripping pillows, starting the blender without a lid, and scratching the door frame. Nani has had enough and threatens to kick Stitch out of the house and return him to the dog shelter. Lilo objects by describing Stitch as ohana. This is the first time we hear this word, which has become so central to and associated with Lilo & Stitch as a franchise. "Dad said ohana means family," Lilo says. "Family means nobody gets left behind or forgotten." According to the oral history of Lilo & Stitch I referred to previously, during the production of Lilo & Stitch, the crew visited Hawaii and conducted extensive research that "changed the course of the film visually, musically, and narratively". The piece states that the directors of the film "understood early on that they were outsiders seeking to make a film about a specific culture, and that for too long, Hawaii had been a pretty and exotic backdrop to stories about characters from the mainland". Consequently, the production team made it a priority to conduct "as much research as possible and work[] with individuals from the community to create an authentic sense of the place and the people". The emphasis of the phrase ohana within Stitch's character development is clearly one such consequence of this research.
At this point, the film finally presents the audience with reasons to sympathize with Stitch. At night, Stitch grows anxious and restless, unable to wreck anything else in Nani and Lilo's home lest he risk getting thrown out and possibly captured by Jumba and Pleakley. Jumba notices this and grows intrigued. "Now this is interesting," he says. "626 was designed to be a monster, but now, he has nothing to destroy. You see, I never gave him a greater purpose. What must it be like to have nothing, not even memories to visit in the middle of the night?" We then see the little blue creature ask Lilo to read to him from a book—and it's The Ugly Duckling, a fairy tale that most American children would be familiar with. Stitch sees himself in the ugly duckling: born without a family and and a place to call home. After hearing the story from Lilo, Stitch finally calms down and settles into the little bed that Lilo made for him.
Fundamentally, Lilo & Stitch is a story about a villian who turns into a hero. That is also how Sanders described his film: "Really, if you take everything away from Lilo & Stitch, that's what the story is. It's a redemption story where the villain and the hero are the very same character." The morning after Nani gets fired, the social worker returns and gives Nani an ultimatum: find a new job, or Lilo has to go. Thus, she spends the whole day trying to find a new job. Lilo and Stitch need to stay close by, of course—the social worker had previously chastised Nani for leaving Lilo home alone too frequently. While Nani applies for jobs, Lilo tries to train Stitch to be a "model citizen" (also a request from the social worker). Every time Nani seems to be close to landing a new job, Stitch reverts to his destructive behavior and embarasses her. We are rooting hard for Nani, and from one perspective, Stitch is the villain whose actions are preventing Lilo and Nani from staying together. This all culminates in the "Hawaiian Roller Coaster Ride" scene, the conclusion to which sees Stitch appear to drag Lilo into the water, causing both of them to nearly drown. This is the last straw for the social worker, who tells Nani that he'll be back in the morning to take Lilo away.
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| Stitch's last act of unprovoked agression in the film |
All throughout this day, though, we see glimmers of the hero in Stitch start to come out. He goes along with Lilo's lessons and appears to enjoy himself before something always seems to aggravate him and cause him to revert back to his villainous ways. His final regression in the film occurs shortly after the "Hawaiian Roller Coaster Ride" sequence: after David rescues him from the ocean, he lashes out at David and Lilo. After the social worker tells Nani he'll be back in the morning for Lilo, David tells Stitch: "You know, I really believed they had a chance. Then you came along."
These words drive a knife through Stitch's heart. After this point, he is submissive and guilt-ridden, and he does not perform another act of unprovoked aggression again for the remainder of the film. He watches in sadness as Nani tries and fails to muster the courage to tell Lilo that they have to separate. According to the oral history, this moment was difficult to write, and it was actually Tia Carrere, the voice actress for Nani, who suggested that Nani simply sing the traditional Hawaiian folk song "Aloha 'Oe", which is song of goodbye. It is one of the most heartbreaking moments in the film, second perhaps only to the scenes that follow, the first of which shows Stitch finding a picture of Lilo and Nani together with their parents.
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| Lilo: "That's us before—it was rainy, and they went for a drive. What happened to yours? I hear you cry at night. Do you dream about them? I know that's why you wreck things and push me." |
Lilo reveals a shocking part of Stitch's character that we didn't get to see on screen: Stitch cries at night. When Lilo confronts Stitch about this, he looks away and hugs a pillow. Lilo offers to let Stitch join her family, but Stitch, overcome with guilt from having torn apart Nani and Lilo, decides it's for the best if he leaves. As he crawls out the window, Lilo hugs the picture of her parents and accepts Stitch's departure: "... if you want to leave, you can. I'll remember you, though. I remember everyone that leaves." Stitch takes with him The Ugly Duckling, and he sits alone in the middle of the forest, like the ugly duckling did in the page before his family finds him, and he utters one of his few coherent lines of dialogue in the film: "Lost. I'm lost."
Stitch's character is silent for the majority of the film aside from some grunts and some gibberish, but when he does say a few words towards the end of the movie, they become the most consequential lines of dialogue in the entire story. After Gantu arrives on Earth and accidentally kidnaps Lilo instead of Stitch, Stitch explains to Nani why he wants to rescue her by repeating what Lilo had previously said to stop Nani from kicking him out: "Ohana means family. Family means nobody gets left behind or forgotten." Right in front him throughout the entire story was a girl who genuinely cared about him and gave him a place to belong, and despite yearning for a sense of belonging himself, all he did was tear apart what little family she had. The time is now for the villain's redemption arc. After they succeed in rescuing Lilo, the Grand Councilwoman arrives on Earth and arrests Stitch herself. However, unlike the Experiment 626 that shouted vulgarities in the Galactic Federation Headquarters, Stitch surrenders without opposition, and his speech is exactly what the Grand Councilwoman was looking for at the start of the movie when she asked him to give them a sign that there was something inside him that is good.
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| Stitch: "This is my family. I found it all on my own. It's little and broken, but still good. Yeah, still good." |
The third and final prong of the Shakespeare-descended comic formula that I discussed earlier is resolution through marriage. Obviously, there is no marriage at the end of Lilo & Stitch, but we do find something remarkably similar. The Grand Councilwoman declares: "Take note of this: this creature has been sentenced to life in exile, a sentence that shall be henceforth served out here, on Earth, and as caretaker of the alien lifeform Stitch, this family is now under the official protection of the United Galactic Federation." It is legal recognition that Lilo, Stitch, and Nani are now a family, one that the social worker is forced to accept through a deus ex machina: apparently he is a former CIA agent with knowledge of the existence of aliens. These kinds of deus ex machina are not uncommon in comedy stories—even Shakespeare had his fair share of them from time to time. Because of this, I don't find it hard to forgive the writers for this easy exit, as it gives Stitch's character arc a satisfactory and emotionally touching conclusion.
Stitch's character arc appeals to sensibilities I've previously written about on this blog. In 2021, I wrote a blog post about Pixar's 2020 movie Soul, which is about a jazz musician and an unborn soul who both struggle to give meaning to life. A few months later, I wrote a post about Porter Robinson's song "Trying to Feel Alive", which is about Robinson's struggle to feel satisfied. Both posts described a sensation of feeling lost and then finding comfort in what is right there in front of you. So too does Stitch struggle with a lost sense of identity and purpose. It is not hard to empathize with him. Jumba remarks at one point in the film that, as Stitch's creator, he never assigned him a "greater purpose". Well, it's not like a lot of humans know what their "greater purpose" is either.
As a kid, Lilo & Stitch is just a fun movie about a silly alien who wrecks things and then saves the day. Rewatching the movie as an adult, you realize the movie is thematically quite dark. Stitch's struggle with belonging and purpose is one that I suspect many of us experience at some point in our lives as we navigate this world and explore what our role in it is. In The Ugly Duckling, the titular character realizes at the end that he is in fact a swan and belongs with other swans. Despite that story's influence on Stitch's character development, Lilo & Stitch is actually a rejection of the premise of The Ugly Duckling. It asks, what if the ugly duckling is in fact the monster he thinks he is? Is all hope lost? Is there truly no place where he can belong?