Pop Culture Happy Hour - Lilo & Stitch

Episode Date: May 27, 2025

The new Lilo & Stitch is mostly live-action and retells the original Disney animated film's story of two orphaned Hawaiian sisters and the chaotic alien who upends their lives. The movie deviates from the original in many ways, but the central story is a tale of sisterhood and found family with lots of rowdy chaos along the way. The cast includes Maia Kealoha, Sydney Elizebeth Agudong, Zach Galifianakis, and Chris Sanders returns as the voice of Stitch.In honor of Toy Story's 30th anniversary, we're ranking the Pixar movies. What do you think is the best Pixar feature? Vote now! We'll talk about the results in an upcoming episode.Follow Pop Culture Happy Hour on Letterboxd at letterboxd.com/nprpopculture See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

Disney has been remaking its animated classics at a furious pace, and now they've tackled their most recent classic yet, 2002's Lilo and Stitch. The new version of Lilo and Stitch is mostly live action, and retells the original film story of two orphaned Hawaiian sisters and the chaotic alien who upends their lives. I'm Aisha Harris. And I'm Stephen Thompson. Today we are talking about Lilo and Stitch on Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR.

Joining us today is co-host of Slate's ICYMIMI podcast and former pop culture happy hour producer Candice Lim, hey Candice. Hello. And also with us is entertainment journalist and contributor, Char Jossal. Welcome back, Sharr. Hello, thank you for having me. Oh, thanks for being here. So glad to have everyone here to talk Lilo and Stitch. Lots of previous beloved Disney animated movies were about a princess trying to balance her personal ambitions with the pressures of inheriting a kingdom. But Lilo and Stitch was refreshingly different. Its main protagonist is a young Hawaiian girl named Lilo,

and its cute animal, a fugitive alien named Stitch, was adorable, but also a creature literally bred to sow chaos. The remake's plot is similar to the original. Lilo is played by Maya Kloha. She recently lost her parents, and is being raised in Hawaii by her well-meaning but overwhelmed older sister Nani, played by Sydney Elizabeth Agudong. They have enough to worry about,

with social workers breathing down their necks, but then Lilo adopts an adorable blue alien she names Stitch. Stitch, it turns out, was created by a rogue alien scientist seeking an unstoppable agent of destruction and has fled to Earth to evade capture. He's pursued on Earth by two aliens, his creator, played by Zach Galaphanacus, and the goofy pleakly played by Billy Magnuson.

The film deviates from the original in many ways, but the central story remains. It's a tale of sisterhood and found family with lots of rowdy chaos along the way. The remake of Lilo and Stitch was directed by Dean Fleischer Camp, who also did Marcel The Shell with Shoes on. It's in theaters now. Sharr, I'm going to start with you.

What did you think of the new Lilo and Stitch? I really enjoyed it. I enjoyed it much more than I thought I would. And that means a lot coming for me, because if I'm being honest, Stitch made me itch. And I don't know if... In the animated version, he did. did not, but there was something about making him life-like in this reimagining of the 2002 classic. All the crawling around and stuff, he made me itch, but it was a good children's film.

Like, I enjoyed it for what it was. And how about you, Aisha? Look, I am usually the one we tap to talk about these live-action remakes, and I'm usually the one who's like, why? Why did we do this? But I went back and I remembered a piece that I wrote 10 years ago, well, 10 years ago in Slate, where I was arguing against Disney remaking all of its most beloved classics. I was like, why are we redoing Snow White? Why are we redoing Cinderella? Like Aladdin, like, and some of these hadn't even like come out yet. Yeah.

My argument was we need to remake the movies that if we're less successful, your black caldrons, maybe your fox and the hounds. I didn't mention Lilo and Stitch, but I guess I would kind of put it in that category. Look, it's beloved. I loved it when it came out. I really enjoy it, but it's not a movie that necessarily people like know off the back of their hand. This is not beating the piece we're talking about here. And so I think when I came into this, I was like, oh, this could go either way. And I have to say, this might be the first live action remake of a Disney movie that I actually really enjoyed.

Wow. Now, where most of the scene, like, were a lot of the scenes basically shot for shot, word for word, yes. And yet they still brought me pleasure and joy. And Stitch is adorable. I love Stitch. I had a plushy stitch from the Disney store when I was like 14. Was I too old? Maybe it doesn't matter.

How? Whoa. I think he's just cute. And while this didn't tug at my heartstrings in quite the same way that the animated version does, I enjoyed myself. So it made me happy, which no other live action remake has done yet. It made you happy is like kind of the ultimate endorsement, right? I went to the movies and had a good time. Is itself a very positive review?

Yes. Correct. All right. Thanks, Aisha. Candice, how about you? So I love the original 2002 film. I think something to know is that this remake is beat for beat. Like, same thing, same story.

Most of the characters are still in here, and they all look very familiar. Stitch kind of by live-actioning him a little bit, he becomes Blue Paddington. And I think kids really like that comp. I personally like the 2002 film more just because I think the animation and just kind of this like hand drawn colored pencil frame by frame depiction of Hawaii and the character is just really appeals to me more from a calming sensation. But I will say that I think this film did a really good job of sticking to the original plot. I think there's still a lot of love there. There's still a lot of like moments where you tear jerk moments that are funny. I will say I don't think there's enough.

Elvis, and I don't know if that's because they were having issues with his state or whatever. Yeah, there's less Elvis in this remake. It felt like the same amount of Elvis. Maybe that's just me. They cut an Elvis montage. Yeah. Oh, that's true. Yeah.

But the thing is, like, that is more about my own relationship to the first film, which is that it was my first time, like, seeing a depiction of Hawaiian culture. It was my first time listening to Elvis. It was, like, you know, my first time watching a Disney movie that's not about a princess. And so there's a lot there that I hold from a nostalgic place that I kind of realize like, oh, like, this movie is very much for like the next generation of people who want to watch Lilo and Stitch, who didn't get to see it the first time. And so I think they'll like it because Stitch, physical comedy, a lot better in this one. I'll say that. It's really interesting, Candace, that you mentioned people who aren't familiar with the first one and how they might engage with this film.

every one of these remakes that I've seen, and I have seen a lot of them, every single one of them was of a movie that I had seen not just once but multiple times. But for a variety of reasons, going into the screening, I had never seen the original Lilo and Stitch. What? It came out in 2002. My son was one year old. My daughter was not yet born.

He was too young to go to the movies. We had already kind of made the transition from being a Disney family to being a Pixar family. So, like, Lilo and Stitch just kind of fell into this chasm and was sort of never discovered by our family. And so as this screening was approaching, I'm going to do something I've never gotten to do before. I'm going to watch the remake and then the original and see if that kind of improves my outlook on the remake. This is a great experiment. Yes, yes. had like Shar and Aisha a sense like I'm enjoying this more than I've enjoyed most of these

remakes. I think in part because for me it was a pretty fresh story and in part because I do think this is better than most of the remakes. But I did see even having not seen the original, I could see where areas of this film really did not benefit from being live action. And one of the crucial differences between this film and the original is that this film is like 20 minutes longer than the original film. And that is without the Elvis montage. So they took some things out and still made a much longer movie. I looked down at my watch at one point and right at the moment when the title characters finally meet, it was about 30 minutes into the movie. And I was like, that is a long time to get your titular characters to finally

interact. Yeah. I mean, Stephen, I thought the same thing and I pinpointed the minute I felt this. So in the original film, there's this really funny scene where Lilo has caused some chaos. She comes home. Nani is like knocking on the door being like, let me in, let me in, let me in, let me in. And she looks in and Lilo is lying on the floor, deadpan, lip syncing to Elvis. It's my favorite scene. And it's such a quick moment. But I think what you're talking about is the fact that there's a lot of stuff you can do with animation that you can't do with live action.

The first is that you can give animals faces. You can give children like a lot more expression. you can kind of get there quicker. And that's why I think the first film is so much funnier. Because the humor is in the stuff that Lilo does, not what she says. Like one scene, and like one thing I actually miss is that in the first film, there's like this really funny moment where Lilo just like takes pictures of Taurus on the beach for like no reason. And then she like shows on her wall.

She's a collage of all of them. And you notice they're all like white and they're bigger. And the thing she says is aren't they so beautiful? And I was like, oh my God, that's so cute. And they took that out. And I was like, okay. Body positive messaging has been excavated, but that's fine. They also removed little scenes that I was kind of looking forward to,

like when Lilo kind of kicks her bully's ass. Yes. For lack of better words, like she, the girl in the dance class has a little bit too much lip for Lilo. Well, she does get shoved. She gets shoved. And she could have done more. And she should have done more. Yes, she does get shoved.

But you know, in the animated film. Yeah, yeah, they're throwing hands. Yeah, they're throwing some hands. but I did enjoy the addition of like scenes like Stitch arriving on planet Earth and kind of ruining the wedding. The obligatory Bruno Mars. The brutal Mars. Right.

I flipped out. To be clear, he's not in it. They just play Uptown Funk in the background. He doesn't make any cameos, although I was waiting for it. I did wonder, for me, a big plot hole. And again, this is a children's film. I know, Char, I know. When the wedding photographer was taking pictures of Stitch,

I thought that was going to go somewhere. And it didn't go anywhere. Like, I thought we were going to see Stitch, you know, CNN talking about Stitch. Because what did the wedding photographer do with these pictures of this big blue rat rolling through the wedding trying to get a slice of cake? So I was like, that kind of felt unnecessary. But again, I understand children's film. I think they had to look for shortcuts where they could find them. Doing it in live action instead of cartoons really forces you to show your work in ways.

that are bound to make scenes longer. But I did want to acknowledge that there are a couple of changes to this film that live action necessitated that I thought actually did improve. In order to have Jumba and Pleakley, you know, kind of interact with these scenes and engage in the action, they had to sort of give them human forms. In the original films, they are occasionally in kind of clumsy disguises, but they always look exactly like aliens. Pleakley basically looks like a skinnier Mike Wazowski.

Yes. You know, he's like that one giant eyeball and a bob that makes up most of his head. He's not going to integrate seamlessly into human society. And so they have to come up with a workaround in a live action version of the film. And the way they do that is sort of by hand-waving a piece of technology that allows them to duplicate a human form. And so Jumba now looks like Zach Galaphanacus. And Pleakley now looks like Billy Magna. And that allows them to do some physical comedy with them suddenly in human bodies for the first time.

And I have to say that the casting of Billy Magnuson as a goofy alien named Pleakley who has suddenly taken human form, that is the role that Billy Magnuson was born to play. Totally. Totally. Yes. He's very funny in that role. I also think like one of the other changes, not even changes, but additions that they add to this, is a little bit more. more of the sort of stress that Nani is under because, you know, Tia Carrere here is, she voiced Nani

in the original film, but then here she's playing a social worker. And there's a lot more talk about, you know, health insurance and guardianship. And that really, it kind of sets it in a contemporary mode and it brings forth some things that like a little kid might not fully be able to process, but I think as an adult, it's like, oh, this is a little bit. more real than the original. And also just like, I love these little touches of the way Lilo just like sneaks into the resort. It's like there's all these people who are just there to vacation. But she's like, I live here, but I'm going to enjoy the benefits of this resort. And she has a great line where someone asked her like, are you supposed to be here? And she's like,

I'm here for the convention. I'm in town for the convention. I was like, that's funny. I was like, you're sick. You heard someone say that. And you use, like, there's little little touches like that that like, yes, they add to the runtime. But I also think, you You know, if it's live action, it does give a little bit more heft and weight and more stakes to what is going to happen between Nani and Lilo. They were really good parents. Hey, I changed my mind. What's that? Hmm?

I like you love Mom too. Yeah, I think Lilo's character in this film is also a little different because I think in the 2002 film, she actually gives me, like, Louise Bell's. her from Bob's Burger's vibes. Right? Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Chaotic, possibly demonic. But like kind of an adult sometimes where she realizes she has to take care of herself

because the thing she keeps saying is she has no friends. And I think seeing her being like a small child and like that super cute dress, like I've always felt very connected to that. I felt a little less connected to this version of Lilo. But I wonder if it's because in this film, I feel like a theme I see a lot. is like reparenting. There's these moments where Nani has to have a hard conversation with Lilo and Nani is who is essentially a child raising a child, raising a child named Stitch.

Like there's this kind of moment where Nani kind of has to tell Lilo like the social workers are taking you away from me. She can't even say it. It's so hurtful and it's so sad. And Lilo does this thing where she just pats Nani's leg. And I was like, whoa, the child is parenting the parent. And I was kind of like, that's a theme that I did not really see nor pick up from the first film. And I was kind of like, I guess that's something that you can do with live action, that you can't do so much with animation.

It's all on the looks. And I think Nani does a lot of like meaningful looks to David, her kind of love interest, to the social worker to Courtney B. Vance, who pops up as cobra bubbles. Like there's something there. But I actually feel like that's more for the parents taking their kids to this film. They're picking up on the stuff that like kids. don't really hear or see as much. For sure. And speaking to some of the differences, like, we needed the Pleakley and Drag scene that was missing for me.

And also Gantu was missing. I believe that's the character's name, the one that's like half whale, half elephant. He's Jack Shamu. I'm going to say it. You know the Zootopia Hot Tiger on the subway? I felt that way about him. And we'll leave that there. He was missing, though.

I would have loved to have seen him, but I did also enjoy the addition of, like, David's mom or grandmother. Yeah. Well, that was Amy Hill, who in the original, she had a smaller character in the original movie. Oh, really? I didn't know that. Yeah, but she's playing two-to.

It's, like, there's, like, her and I think Chris Sanders, who, of course, voices Stitch, like Tia Carrere are the holdovers from their previous film. And then here, of course, you have, because Little and Stitch came out in 2002, which is like after Aladdin, but before Moana, it's like you had a little white girl voicing Lilo and in the original

and you had some cross racial casting and the voice cast here where here you have actual people who are at least of Asian descent. I don't know if they're all Pacific Islander, but yeah, it was interesting to see the sort of like holdovers from the original and the people who, you know,

the new face. here. Well, she was my comedic relief. She was fun. That's what I was laughing at for the most part. Yeah. I do want to single out some quick praise for the performance of Sydney Elizabeth Agudong, who plays Nani here. She is really

required to do some actual acting. They're not able to sort of shorthand their interactions. And so the emotional beats in this film really do have to come from these people acting out these scenes and doing it well enough that you care about them. I was really drawn to that performance.

I thought it was a strong performance, especially for somebody who's having to kind of act against, you know, blue screen and reacting to a chaos agent that is not in front of them. I thought I thought she handled the emotional beats of this film very well in ways where the emotions of this really landed for me. Why do I have to be at your work? I'm sick. Because someone got kicked out of hula. Stay here. So boring here. And no.

Dogs on the table. Why not? Because people eat off them. Nani. She was stressed it was palpable through the screen. I was like, Lilo, get it together. I know you're six. But where's the compassion for your sister?

Get it together. I felt it through the screen. Like, I just, she needed a hug. She needed a hug. Yeah, I think what I'll say is that I kind of want to talk about music because one of the most iconic songs of the American songbook is from Lilo and Sitch, which is Hawaiian roller coaster ride. There's no place I'd be.

Hawaiian roller coaster rides. I love that song, too. I love that song. It's always in my summer playlist. I love it. And they do bring it. And I will say I actually really enjoyed the score of this film because there actually is space where they include scenes that are just like the camera on the water, looking out into the ocean.

And they have that in the first film as well. And I really enjoy that like peacefulness, that kind of acknowledgement of the nature. because this is one of the most natural Disney films, especially from that era. I will say, though, the reason why I root for the animated film so much is because it just feels so handmade and it feels so touched by people who really wanted to do something and represent the Hawaiian culture as best as they could. And I just think as a kid, I remember being like, oh, Lilo is someone I could draw. Stitch is someone I could definitely draw in color and kind of like spend time with that way. If your kid likes this, like highly recommend showing them the animated version because I think there are a lot of animators now who watch that film and felt inspired to animate, inspired to do art. And I think there's something there that is lost when we go towards this kind of remake culture.

But I'm not mad about it because if I was offered to directly Loan Stitch, I too would go to Hawaii. And I too would have fun with a little blue stitch and Billy Bagnoson, who I love, who I love. So Candice, I'm going to throw this out there as an idea for Disney. Remakes of these films with hand-drawn animation. That was my thought as well. Give me who friend Roger Rabbit because that was my one thing about Stitch and all of the animated characters in this, the CGI characters. It's like, why can't they be brighter? Like, why does it have to look dark and dull?

Like, make it look brighter. Yeah. Maybe that's why Stitch was making me it. Like, I literally, there were times, no, I don't want to sound dramatic, y'all, but they There were times where I was like, I can't watch, like, him scaling the wall. I hate it when he went from alien form and turned himself into the dog, you know, when he. When his arms sucking. When I tell you, I like lost my appetite, but it's just a tick I have.

I was like, I don't even want the popcorn anymore. It was so great. Can I speak on my ick? And I do feel passionate about this, which is that before Pleakley becomes Billy Magnuson, he does touch down on Earth with his big eye. I was having like eye contact issues. I did not want to look him in the eye because the eye was too human. And it freaked me out. And I'm just saying in the original film, his eye is a perfect 2D circle within a circle.

And I actually was really creeped out by this in a very like snow white dwarves way. So yeah. Oh, my God. We want to know what you think about Lilo and Stitch. Find us on Facebook at facebook.com slash PCH and on letterboxed at letterboxed.com slash NPR Pop Culture. We'll have a link in our episode description. That brings us to the end of our show, Shah Jossil, Candice Lim, Aisha Harris.

Thanks so much for being here. Thank you. Thank you. We've got one last thing before we go. This year marks the 30th anniversary of Toy Story, which is Pixar's first feature. So we are assembling a power ranking of the best Pixar films. We need your help. What do you think are the best Pixar movies

I have a strong takes. We will have a link to a poll in our episode notes, boat now. This episode was produced by Liz Metzker and Mike Katzif and edited by our showrunner, Jessica Reedy. Hello, Come In, provides our theme music. Thank you for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. I'm Stephen Thompson.

We will see you all next time.