The Dark Herald Recommends Lilo and Stitch (2025)

I’ve never been so tempted to turn a review entirely over to AI.

In 2002 Lilo and Stitch was released to a rather disappointing box office that totaled $245 million. It wasn’t a bomb but Michael Eisner needed it to be a blowout like The Lion King and it just wasn’t. It was yet another brick in the all-downhill road that would lead to Michael Eisner’s ouster.

This weekend, Lilo and Stitch (live-action) blew past that benchmark to land at $342 million worldwide.  It’s going to hit a billion at the minimum. At least Iger won’t have to announce the opening of another Disney Park in Kyiv or Kathmandu or some other godawful place next quarter. 

 So what sets this one apart from the original?

It’s live-action Lilo and Stitch. That’s it.  That’s pretty much the only difference.  

It’s nearly a shot-for-shot remake of what was and is a fairly good kid’s movie from Disney’s post-Renaissance period. The original was released at a time when the theaters were being saturated by cheap animated garbage like Doug’s First Movie and Rugrats.  The DVD market was even more flooded and Disney was doing a lot of that flooding. 

Consequently, a decent little film like Lilo and Stitch got swept under the rug. However, in the ensuing years, kids turned it into something of a good enough classic.  The art design was certainly no Sleeping Beauty, but it wasn’t like the minimum effort Home on the Range either.

I’d review the plot at this point but I’m positive you already know it. 

So, I’ll go over the differences instead. 

First, Jumba got done dirty.  The writers decided, (correctly I think), to eliminate the character of Captain Bantu and just make Jumba the heavy. Gen Z parents who were fans of the animated filler material… meaning the DVDs and TV show will not appreciate it but there aren’t too many of those just yet. Anyway, Jumba does all the stuff Bantu did. While this did tighten things up, it may have simply been the result of Disney not being comfortable with a heavy that is named after a tribe that is killing Whites in South Africa. 

The character of Bubbles was sensibly split up.  It was a little ridiculous to have a Child Protective Services Officer also be a troubleshooter for Area 51. 

The CPS officer is now a sympathetic woman, Mrs Kekoa, played by Nani’s original actress Tia Carrere and holy shit has the curse of middle-aged Polynesian Women has hit her like a freight train, we aren’t talking Bloody Mary yet but she is headed in that direction.

Jason Scott Lee who played David in the animated version was credited as “Luau Manager.”  Okay, Disney, live-action Mulan’s failure was your fault, not his.

These nice little shoutouts were kind of depressing.

The biggest change was what must have felt like a necessary contrivance by the NPCs that run Disney.  In the OG Nani is an 18-year-old girl who is working blue-collar jobs to keep custody of her sister. 

In 2025 it is an immeasurable tragedy for a brown girl to not be going to college, so they had to contrive a way for this to happen for Nani. First, she is now super smart, Nani does absolutely nothing to demonstrate this, but people keep saying it, and that’s the same as proof.  She even has a full ride to UCSD, which I think was meant to be the proof, but the only thing it proved is that Nani is a brown girl with a three-digit IQ.  Anyway, she has given up her scholarship to take care of her sister but as part of the custody she had to get Obamacare. However, what with aliens destroying everything it slips through the cracks and so does her custody of Lilo.  

However, Lilio gets signed over to the super friendly neighbor woman.  And Nani can visit her sister whenever she wants because one of the writers played Portal and decided to plagiarize Valve by bringing in the Portal gun. So Nani can just portal in from San Diego whenever she wants. 

That’s it.  Those are the only differences.  Other than that it is the exact same movie to include importing all of Stitch’s alien bafflegab from the 2002 version, intact and unaltered. 

The performances were fine. The kid playing Lilo was as good as you are going to get with a child actor. 

The director’s vision is no different from the original.

All the songs are the same. 

The tone is the same.

The message of family is the same because it’s okay to give up custody of your kid sister so long as you have a Portal Gun. 

The 2025 both honors and exploits the original.  

Anything else?  I guess not.  If your kids are beating you up to see this thing and you can’t fob them off with the Eisener-era animated version then you will be about as entertained as you would have been by that one. At least they used mostly humans instead of making it all CG. 

Okay, I’m done here.

The DH Recs with Conf (3.8/5 which is damn generous of me given that I detest live-action remakes).