Lilo and Stitch (2025) Movie Review: A Joyless remake of a heartwarming original stripped of heart and warmth

Disney has a giant archive of amazing stories, films which left an indelible mark on popular culture. Every time the centenarian media empire decides to make a live-action remake of their beloved animation films, it comes with allegations of being a ‘shallow cash grab’. And every time it happens, you cannot help but give the studio the benefit of the doubt because remakes are neither new nor entirely a pointless endeavour. In some cases, remakes have improved upon the original or at least kept the spirit of what made the original unique alive. Even if the remake is a mindless recreation of the original film, an argument could be made that it serves to introduce the story to a new generation of audiences. Having said all of that, the new Lilo and Stitch live-action remake is definitely an affront to the very idea of ‘benefit of the doubt’. 

Director: Dean Fleischer Camp
Cast: Sydney Elizebeth Agudong, Billy Magnussen, Hannah Waddingham, Chris Sanders, Zach Galifianakis

The problem with Lilo and Stitch (2025) is not that it is a mindless cash grab (which it is) but it also snuffs out the light at the heart of the original and presents a hollow recreation. It is the difference between someone trying to make you smile with a joke and another trying to do the same by asking you to curl your lips a certain way. Stitch, the chaotic loveable menace, is still an adorable alien because the CGI creation follows its 2D animated predecessor beat-for-beat. However, everything around Stitch, which is mostly populated by humans, crumbles to the floor. You get a shot-by-shot recreation of the original Stitch, with the 3D puppet, and the frame immediately cuts to a close-up of an actor and their expressions make it extremely apparent that they were most probably reacting to nothing. While this is true for any visual effects-heavy film, here, it feels like the actors weren’t given any direction. So, you see a wacky, cartoony shenanigan by Stitch, which is then immediately followed by an actor standing confused, unsure of what they’re supposed to be looking at as they read lines off a cue card.

The film even misunderstands the comic timing of the original. For example, in the animated film, when Lilo mistakes Stitch’s spaceship crash landing on Earth for a meteor, she diligently wishes for an angel to be her friend. The scene then immediately cuts to the silhouette of an exultant Stitch standing in front of his burning ship, like a demon who finally crawled out of hell to gleefully prank the earthlings. The sudden switch in contrast pulls a chuckle out of you. Even though the scene plays out the same way in the live-action film, the flat line-reading of Lilo’s wish followed by the botched timing in showing Stitch climbing on top of his spaceship debris, severely debilitates its humour. This is a small example of a larger problem with the live-action remake. In their desperation to translate Lilo and Stitch into a live-action format, the makers failed to understand why it worked. What we get as a result is not a remake but a shallow imitation, like how a parrot listens to words but, without any understanding of the concept of language, it merely gives back sounds.

Disney presents an interesting conundrum with its live-action remakes. Do we need live-action remakes? How do they improve upon the original? Why can’t they remake the film with modern-day animation techniques? All the questions essentially boil down to one: Why does this film exist when we already have a far superior version of the same? Art needs no reason to exist, a creative vision doesn’t have to justify its own existence. However, the problem with Lilo and Stitch, and almost all the other live-action Disney films is that, with every successive film, they try less and less to pretend like they are creative visions. Instead, they feel like a ‘logical business decision’ made by a room full of executives who want to leverage their ‘dormant assets’. Even if that is not the case, and even if this is borne out of a sincere intention to make a compelling remake, it simply demonstrates the superiority of animation, as the perfect medium to deliver unrestrained, imaginative, and colourful entertainment.

Disney can afford to do these live-action remakes because it has a vault full of amazing original stories. But you can only re-insert the same stack of sugarcane into the crusher so many times until the juice runs out. Let’s just hope when they finally run out of things to pull out of the vault, the lesson they learn from this mundane endeavour is not that people like live-action films but that their original animation films had a light, bright enough that even after decades, people were willing to witness it once again, even if it shines dimly through tainted glass.