Lilo And Stich 2025 - Blog Posts

This is pretty self-explanatory

After seeing all the responses to it, I decided to ☠️ the live action Lilo & Stitch to see the damage for myself. Setting aside the common criticisms (no gantu, jumbas... everything, Nani and Lilo's relationship or lack thereof, cobra bubbles/the social worker, The Ending), something that honestly killed the movie in its infancy for me is its pace and its noise.

This movie is allergic to beats of silence or introspective moments, which is bonkers, because that's one of the things that makes the original so strong. Lilo walking home alone after hula practice. Nani sneaking to hear Lilo's prayer. The quiet after the incident at the beach before Lilo says, "You ruined everything." Stitch alone in the woods before he cries out that he's lost. All of these moments so many more are cradled by silence as the movie urges us to look and listen with patience. In the live action, these moments are rushed (at least the ones that are still in it, as not all of them are) and they suffer for it. Hell, even Stitch's escape sequence is undermined by how rapid the pacing is.

So many times, I found myself just wishing for the movie to *breathe*. There are so few moments of quiet introspection, and the ones that are there are still littered with extra things that just clutter the simple, powerful story underneath it. Tack on that almost every single intimate character moment or interaction is punctuated with a joke of some kind. It's like the movie is insecure about its own sincerity, so it buries it under cheap jokes and quips.

What really gets me is that the original is funny in part because of its ability to be quiet. Lilo showing Nani Stitch's record player trick is funny as fuck in the original because of how its quiet. Lilo's deadpan face, Nani's stunned silence, and the pauses when Lilo closes his mouth all service the comedy of the scene. The scene also acts as another reinforcement of Nani's understanding of Lilo in that she simply watches to see what the fuck her weirdo little sister has figured out.

In the live action, they have Lilo talking throughout the whole bit, and Nani just offhandedly responds while only looking at her phone (the movie is so confused as to how Nani feels about Lilo in my opinion) and it just falls flat, even with the read that the scene is meant more to illustrate their strained sister relationship.

It honestly stinks cause the little girl playing Lilo is adorable and doing a great job, especially for her age and for the crappy movie she's in. Her dynamic with Stitch, while altered (she's more of a little troublemaker type in this, sneaking into resorts, freeing someone's chickens, sneaking candy to feed the shelter dogs, etc.), is still well done and very wholesome. I just wish they'd gotten a better movie to be in.

Tldr; the movie lacks dynamic pacing and the quiet moments that made the original movie's simple, grounded (lol sort of) story so impactful.

Social Media is dead to me!

This is the last post.

I QUIT!

Social Media is dead to me!

This is the last post.

I QUIT!

Stitch Selfie | Lilo & Stitch (2025) 

I actually feel terrible for the kids who’ve only seen the live action Lilo & Stitch. Imagine being a little kid identifying with Lilo and having the “happy ending” of this movie tell you that you are, actually, a burden. That being little and needing help and maybe being weird, being troubled, not knowing the right way to act, not fitting in and not understanding why you can’t be like everybody else is, actually, grounds for your family to abandon you during your time of need in favor of . . . going to school? That thing that can happen at any time? Yeah, that’s more urgent than being there for a grieving kid and making sure she spends her formative years living with someone who understands her, someone she already knows and trusts.

Not that anyone couldn’t figure out that ending the movie this way doesn’t make any sense, but I say this as someone who cut off my family and then went to college. I did that because the family was abusive, not because getting a degree is more important than a loving family. I actually feel uniquely qualified to say that a loving family is vastly more valuable than any kind of degree or career. The former wasn’t an option for me, though, so I set my aim in life lower and went for the education.

Nani, on the other hand, had both options. I won’t be the first person to point out that she very well could have waited to go to college until Lilo was older and more stable, or until she had the means to move both of them to the mainland and didn’t have to leave Lilo behind in order to go. It’s not bad to be a nontraditional student, far from it. I can’t fathom the motivation for giving this version of Nani a dream career that she never had in the original and then making that the most urgent and important thing in Nani’s life . . . in a movie ostensibly about the importance of family.

The infamous ending of the latest live action cash grab is a reflection of the lives, values, and choices of the kinds of people who make it in Hollywood and are in a position to shape such things

They have to write an ending like that and it has to be noble because that is the choice they all make in those kinds of circumstances