Disney’s had many of us stuck in this toxic Stockholm syndrome relationship pulley with live-action remakes for so long — a full decade of this endless loop of expectation, disappointment and masochistic follow-through — that the few projects that actively stand out (for better or worse) feel like an inconvenience at best or a seismic event akin to a nuclear fallout zone. So many people have reached their detonation point with these cash-grabs earlier than most but I’ve seen and endured so many, I actively feared what my breaking point would be.
WELL, I FOUND MINE. The 2025 iteration of “Lilo and Stitch” is the worst live-action remake I’ve seen Disney put out and I do not have the words necessary to properly voice my anger and disgust.
I shocked myself upon finding out Dean Fleischer Camp ‘directed’ this; the same man whose harmonized childlike innocence, layered maturity, and subtle coyness in his direction bolstered the wide-eyed wonder that was Marcel The Shell with Shoes On. Every facet of his signature style here has been stripped away and has hit a directorial flatline. Not only corporatized and sandpapered over, his direction has this lurching, shrill panic of someone who knows they didn’t do a good job.
Given how much of the original film’s wonder came from its dreamy, painstakingly crafted watercolor visuals, placing this tale within the confines of our photorealistic world was always going to be a self-inflicted wound, meaning now Hawaii just looks ghastly to look at. No disrespect to Todd Cheriawsky but his production design only looks Hawaiian in the most generic brochure-grazing sense possible. Putting aside how shifting the location from Kauai to the more built-up Oahu seemingly glosses over and contradicts Stitch's struggle to find a big city to destroy on a remote island, there’s a palpable stiffness to how oddly oppressive the sets feel and the backdrop makes use of the very capitalist practices the original film indirectly called out for having a bad effect on the locals of Hawaii. Why else would Disney change the location JUST to promote their new Hawaiian resort?
Perfunctory sums up most of Nigel Bluck’s cinematography; its quality matches that of the made-for-TV variety you’d occasionally find on Disney Plus. Caged-in and bottled up in a drab visual language, the framework and shot composition is either really repetitive, basic, unobtrusive or uninspired. It’s coated in the typical deep color palette of beige, leeching the vibrancy from the landscapes and the combined efforts of Phillip J. Bartell and Adam Gerstel project the bare minimum of confidence in the editing; barely coherent shots, questionable transitions and exposes some of the more amateurish staging.
Nearly every facet of the pacing mirrors a synthetic Powerpoint presentation—relentless without any sense of rhythm and often biffs the timing of every other individual beat while also feeling bloated at the same time. Costumes don’t stand out at all, there’s distractingly obvious product placement galore, nearly all the jokes feel blandly anachronistic and the tone is nothing short of an emotional whiplash, not only fumbling that delicate balance of humor and pathos but this algorithmic manufacturing through sheer brute force and loudness clangs with the grace of a steel drum dropped down a spiral stairwell. Dan Romer’s musical score is functional but plods away at your eardrums with the subtlety of a carnival barker, yanking at emotional levity it barely tries to build towards. Adding in the Elvis tracks and Hawaiian Rollercoaster Ride out of obligation does not help matters. The sound design feels in tow with the universe we know and nothing else and its a comfortable PG rating with not much else to show for it.
And the action sequences? Forget it. If they’re not rushed to the brim, they’re truncated, feel so void of vitality or get chopped off at the knees before building momentum.
Let’s not mince words here: the acting is mostly uneven — the few competent performances doesn’t overshadow the dismal ‘Buffy Speak’ overt dialogue or how little chemistry they share with each other — and its made worse when almost every single character the cast are forced to inhabit has been butchered beyond recognition! The new characters are there to fulfill a checklist and the ones we grew up with are either thinly drawn or have no dimensionality. Bless Maia Kealoha and Sydney Agudong for trying to make the best out of a sticky situation; they’re both making do with what they’re given.
Chris Sanders as Stitch will always be a constant highlight but even that comes with a buttload of asterisks because I’m convinced those lazy bastards in the studio flat-ass reused about half his old lines from the other films.
Now it’s my turn to drag you into the cold, blue afterglow of this story’s complete and utter disrespect, sanitization and betrayal of the beloved original because if you think for a single second people are exaggerating everything about the narrative here……THEY’RE NOT. As ruthlessly faithful this wants to be to the original (and often apes every detail it wants to keep), it’s gradually dumbed down in every other which way despite switching around so much it feels more like a reimagining than a remake. Sure, the themes of family, identity, redemption and belonging are still prevalent but the punchy preciseness from before is now rendered in broad, uncoordinated strokes and the whole thing is presented with a kind of grim, contractual obligation, as if the only real deadline was “make sure to plug the resort.” Things immediately feel off within the first 6 minutes, cutting off Stitch’s brilliant escape by literally half the time of the original and shamelessly presenting broken stakes, swissed-chesse worldbuilding, inconsistent characterization and issues with basic cinematic presentation straight out of the gate and the contrivances just keep snowballing from there.
Everything about this plot feels like someone putting down a hand of aces—except you’re greeted by scattered UNO cards ripped in half, smeared with store-brand peanut butter and actively set on fire. And that’s what constantly nagged me about the structure: it understands what it’s supposed to be doing but completely misses the purpose of that particular inclusion or why the little details involve matter there, constantly compromising on the themes of the original, vaporizes all the heightened tension and negates every emotional stake imaginable. The lengths it goes to gaslight its audience only cascades with and monumentally fucks with the intended outcomes of the characters implied, between actively NOT calling out the tourism and anti-imperialist rhetorics from the original film, Lilo not feeding Pudge, getting rid of the Ugly Duckling book, recoding Stitch’s earlier malevolent personality, turning Jumba into the main antagonist at the drop of a dime, Gantu being absent from the film entirely, lessening Cobra Bubbles’ role, restructuring the entirety of Lilo and Nani’s relationship to where the former treats her younger sister like a burden and those are just the more obvious discrepancies responsible for poisoning the well in this fustercluck.
It’s literally death by a thousand cuts.
Don’t even get me started on that ending. Look, I can work around this obsession of needing this to end in a close-to-realistic manner possible and changing the message from “support makes it possible to hold on to the people you love” to “sometimes you have to let them go to move forward” does make for a more grounded conclusion…..if the story was anything BUT Lilo and Stitch. From a narrative standpoint, it further bastardizes Nani and Lilo’s entire journey, rendering it effectively pointless and from a historical/cultural perspective, it’s just straight up offensive. Because newsflash, having a Hawaiian family be unjustly separated by forces out of their control will never NOT be deplorably terrifying and cruel! There is literally no upside in TRYING TO PRESENT THE SEPARATION AS A GOOD THING especially if you have to lie about it despite being well-aware that the U.S Healthcare system is a joke. Nani’s decision had an obvious answer staring at her in the face that the script didn’t want you to know about, so portraying this as the only ‘correct’ option ends up screwing up Nani and Lilo’s precarious situation even worse than it was at the beginning when there were barely any stakes to begin with!
At least with previous live action remakes, you can make the debatable argument that many of their issues were due to oversight (thanks to focusing too much on one thing over the other), taking the safe palatable option or just juggling more than they can pirouette with. Here though, it’s practically meticulous how much they bend over backwards to actively fuck up every single plot detail, every single character relationship and every single dramaturgical, allegorical and contextual layering that strengthened the original film and the 1.037 billion dollars it made at the box office in spite of this is just the period at the end of the sentence that Disney’s priorities were ones made entirely out of HATE. Actively taking advantage of Hawaiian culture all in the name of propaganda in a year where we’re facing nothing BUT propaganda from every corner of our corrupt government?
That goes past incompetence, that’s just being a spiteful cocky prick.
A cinematic lobotomy best served as a torture device for ritual humiliation, Lilo and Stitch is a stone cold act of cultural vandalism, a mindfuck of biblical proportions, and the poster child of professionally made art assassination. Godawful betrayal of the original story aside, it’s straight-up offensive propaganda disguised as a shameless nostalgia bait and tourism ad. Ohana might mean family, but this one deserves to be left behind and forgotten.
