Lilo & Stitch 2025: A cartoon chaos monster becomes a real boy

When producer Jonathan Eirich saw the 2002 Disney animation Lilo & Stitch for the first time, he wondered how it got made.

“A child character says, ‘Leave me alone to die’ in the first 15 minutes of the movie, and I was like, ‘This is so delightfully weird’,” he recalled.

Lilo & Stitch is indeed weird. It’s also anarchic and (cartoon) violent, about a little alien chaos monster whose only programming is to destroy. He steals police cruisers, blows up oil tankers and rips pages from books. That doesn’t at all sound like a Disney movie.

“These indelible characters felt so relatably messy. They couldn’t be in other Disney movies, they weren’t princesses. Stitch is the farthest thing from a Disney princess and it wasn’t a fairytale kingdom,” filmmaker Dean Fleischer Camp said of the original film.

Fleischer Camp is the man tapped to remake the 2002 animation in live-action and CGI form. An Oscar nominee for Marcel the Shell With Shoes On, Fleischer Camp’s job was not easy – he had to capture the magic of a beloved animation for not just those who already love it but to also introduce it to a whole new generation.

He also had to keep the weirdness of it alive but give it gravitational and emotional groundedness so that it was believable as live-action.

“We found out pretty early on that because animation is so expressive, you can get away with violence and destruction and it can still seem very funny,” Fleischer Camp said. “I use the example of a 10-car pile-up on the freeway. You can imagine a funny version of that in animation but in live-action, that’s always going to look like a tragedy.

“We had to really invest in what is the type of destruction that Stitch could get away with that we can depict that doesn’t feel scary.”

That meant modulating or changing some of the set-pieces when Lilo & Stitch made the jump to live-action. The exploding fuel tanker is out. But also even smaller things, such as a scene in which Stitch yanks Lilo away from her bed and throws her on the floor. You can’t do that to a real-life six-year-old girl and have it be funny.

The team came up with a new guiding principle, which is that Stitch’s wayward impulses is like that of a toddler – he’s curious and exploring.

Most significant is that he’s adorable. Everyone remembers the Sonic the Hedgehog CGI debacle in which the character had to be redesigned after its debut horrified fans.

Stitch was not going to meet the same fate. That doesn’t mean there weren’t some nerves though.

Eirich said that one of the biggest “phew” moments was when the team revealed the CGI Stitch to the Disney fan convention, D23, in August last year. “People loved the look of him, and I was like, ‘OK, all right, years and years of work actually paid off,” he said.

It wasn’t just about feeding a 2D animated Stitch into a machine to render into 3D CGI. The design was specific and considered – even for an alien, he had to look like he could exist in our world.

“A lot of that was references to things in nature, and it was fur seal pup eyes, and llama fur and bunny ears, to make him feel real,” Eirich said. “But ultimately, if he felt real but didn’t have the same personality, it would’ve fallen with a thud.”

Stitch is still the same raucous creature who gleefully cackles while watching a monster destroy a city in a movie but that is only half the tale. He defies his programming because he meets Lilo. Their friendship, how they become ohana, the way they both change each other has always been the story engine.

Chris Sanders, who voiced Stitch in this version as well as in 2002, and was the co-writer and co-director of the animation, said the key component of the story is “the idea of a character that’s a villain that’s going to become a hero, and the only reason it happens is because of Lilo’s belief in aloha”.

Lilo & Stitch does not take place in a make-believe world. It is very much a real place with real people and a specific cultural history, all of which are imbued into the two core human characters, six-year-old Lilo (Maia Kealoha) and her older sister and guardian Nani (Sydney Elizebeth Agudong).

To the western world, aloha is a greeting but in Hawaii, it also means something more. It encompasses love, compassion, kindness and peace, all the warm and fuzzies.

The spirit of aloha and how it affects Stitch is also a strong argument for nurture over nature, of the good in everyone if someone believes in us.

“What live action affords you is the ability to do is to deepen some of the emotional currents and especially the human characters, and to depict that lived reality of struggle in Hawaii with much more verisimilitude and, hopefully, emotional depth,” Fleischer Camp explained.

Tia Carrera voiced Nani in the animation and returns in the remake as a new character, Mrs Kekoa, a social worker. She loved the watercolour animation of the 2002 movie but considered the remake to have a different charm, and will speak to a generation that grew up on video games and digital images.

But the “heart and soul, and the love and ohana, and the aloha spirit” lives on, she said. “I think it really does, and that’s the most important thing, because that’s what connects with people’s hearts.”

Eirich added, “It’s a movie that really celebrates the messiness and chaos of life, and that it’s OK to be a little bit broken but still good. I think those themes are even more relevant now.”

Lilo & Stitch is in cinemas on Thursday, May 22