Review: Lilo & Stitch

Set in Hawaii, Lilo (voiced by Daveigh Chase) is a frankly weird little girl whose mischievous behaviour is causing child services to send a hulking social worker (voiced by Ving Rhames!) around on Lilo’s guardian, her older sister Nani (voiced by Tia Carrere, overworking her already Hawaiian accent). Then one day Lilo adopts what she thinks is an unusual dog from the local pound (even though it quite clearly looks like a differently coloured koala). Calling it Stitch, it turns out to be an alien, and Stitch’s comrades come to Earth looking for it. In the meantime, Stitch is a chaotic little shit who causes all manner of problems for Lilo, who in turn causes problems for her genuinely loving and hard-working sister.

 

Gee, aren’t kids movies fun, folks? One of the lowest of the lows in Disney animated features, this ugly, unlikeable film from 2002 is directed/scripted by Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders (who later teamed up for DreamWorks’ “How to Train Your Dragon”), the latter of whom irritatingly voices the character of Stitch. It’s not quite as bad as “Fantasia”, but it’s probably below the eye-rolling and patronising “Pocahontas”. The animation here is appalling, we’re talking “Ren & Stimpy” levels of crudity and artlessness. Instead of looking like a Disney film, it looks like a morning cartoon show from post-1997. That’s not a compliment. Most of those shows are terrible. More importantly, for a film that was made after “Tarzan”, it looks incredibly flat and drab. The colours are nice, but the backgrounds look cheap, and remind you of Disney films of the pre-“Little Mermaid” era, once again not a compliment, much as I love a lot of those films. There’s just no life to the backgrounds, they look like matte drawings or water-colour paintings. The character design however, is just as bad. Stitch and the other aliens are charmless, ugly, and uninteresting to look at. If you remember the alien blob from the pissweak “Treasure Planet” (from the same year, not Disney’s best year), that’s how charmless Stitch and co are. He (She?) also speaks in squeaks and farts reminiscent of the title character in Disney’s live-action/animation combo “Pete’s Dragon”. Lilo and the other female Polynesian characters are bizarrely designed to have big, slanted eyes (That’s a description, not a derogatory term in this case) and big fat noses, so that they look more like dugongs with legs, or at best, inbred humans. In regards to Lilo’s sister, those legs are so distinctively masculine that they look like they don’t belong to the rest of her body. The animators have obviously tried for something different and unique, and they’ve come up with something different and unique from what they were actually likely trying to achieve. Seriously, it looks like the lower half of Lilo’s sister’s body has been replaced by a ‘roided-up male bodybuilder.

 

But it’s not just the visual design of the Lilo and Stitch characters I didn’t take to, the characters themselves are thoroughly repellent. Lilo is meant to be adorable, but she’s loud, obnoxious, pudgy, thoughtless, weird, and bratty. Even if one were to excuse some of this as typically childlike, she’s a total brat and completely unlikeable. I know not everyone believes that animated films necessarily need to cater for adults, but this one offers up absolutely nothing for anyone over the age of 10. I can’t even begin to tell you how bad the finale of this film is, except that the character voiced by Ving Rhames (sigh) has apparently worked for the CIA before turning to child welfare. The fuck? He was also highly suspicious of Lilo’s sister’s parenting skills the whole film but apparently doesn’t mind the kid keeping an alien for a pet. WHAT?

 

This is beneath Disney, a terrible and brainless film that is somehow quite popular. You people are sick. It’s like a modern day Saturday morning cartoon of the ugly “SpongeBob” variety stretched to feature length, and featuring characters with no redeeming or interesting qualities whatsoever. I hated this film, in case you were wondering, “ET” it most certainly is not.

 

Rating: D