Divalicious Review! Lilo & Stitch Remake Is Surprisingly Comfortable As Live-Action Drama. CGI, Not So Much
By Caroline Cao | May 23, 2025 | Celebrity & Culture
In 2002, animators Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois directed an animated picture heavily marketed as a maverick kind of animated Disney pic: Lilo and Stitch. It was only a matter of time before the Disney live-action machine decided to swallow this one.
The bar is lower than the beach sands. Still, the 2025 live-action remake delivers its pleasures, only because you can tell director Dean Fleischer Camp is comfortable with the live-action. Screenwriters Chris Kekaniokalani Bright and Mike Van Waes redefine emotional beats effectively.
When it’s the rowdy blue VFX furry alien (Sanders reprising the gremlin voice) crawls across the screen, it’s an awkward eyesore and in a way that serves garishness rather than the character’s inherent chaos. Sans the signature dark blue, he’s virtually identical, but the animated direction on his havoc feels hurried.
When you reflect on Camp’s directorial work with the movie Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, a live-action-animated hybrid itself, it’s disappointing to see Camp puzzling over Stitch and other aliens. In the first five minutes, the ugly CGI-laden alien world nearly sinks the entire film before it orients itself into its grounded live-action Earth on the island of Hawaii and its human characters.
Newcomer Maia Kealoha is an onscreen charmer as the rambunctious 6-year-old. A rising star, she lights the film like the sun itself. Sydney Elizebeth Agudong is the frazzled Nani Pelekai, and much has already been discussed over Agudong’s heritage and light skin, but she plays well with the chemistry with Kealoha.
The film’s stark focus on Nani trying to get her life together as Lilo’s legal guardian is crafted into solid drama. “I liked you better as my sister, not my mom,” Lilo says in one heartbreaking line.
Tia Carrere, the original voice of Nani, appears as a kindly social worker doing her best to figure out stability for the two sisters. Amy Hill, who had a smaller voice role in the film, gets to really shine as a neighbor and supporting family member.
The film is an odd war between CGI-sculpted alien slop and its earnest live-action naturalism, and it shouldn’t feel like a relief to an eyes when the two aliens, the heavy Jumba (Zach Galifianakis) and slender Pleakley (Billy Magnussen, doesn’t get to slay in a dress like the original Pleakley but wears his share of fruity wardrobe), take on their human forms. Although Sanders’s voice remains an inviting performance, Stitch’s anarchic physicality doesn’t register as naturally as he did in his hand-drawn animated iteration. The film feels fresher when Kealoha’s Lilo is being chaotic on her own, and to her credit, she forges her own bond with the VFX Stitch.
There are positives in the film’s third act (even if an antagonist reveal feels flimsily thought out) when characters dovetail into their sacrifices and labors for the happiness of their loved ones. I think years down the line, there will be dramatic qualities in the live-action Lilo and Stitch that will be reappraised kindly. If only the film felt comfortable with its computer animation.
Lilo & Stitch, the live-action version, is now in theaters.
Photo credit: Disney
