‘Lilo & Stitch' review: Disney puts another one through the de-animation machine

The roughhouse charmer 'Lilo & Stitch' from 2002, one of Disney's more freewheeling animated 21st century mashups of slapstick and heartstring-plucking, has already spun off TV and sequel iterations and a lot of merchandise. The film presented a rollicking friendship between a six-legged (six-armed? never could tell) koala-like alien being, new to our planet, and an exuberant Hawaiian Island preteen who has wished, ardently, for a true friend and a fellow chaos agent.
Stitch and Lilo are now in a live-action movie. The new 'Lilo & Stitch' constitutes adequate if wearying fan service at best, and at worst, a new reason to check in with your dentist about a mouth guard for apparent teeth-grinding.
The movie makes me wonder: If you don't grow up with the animated versions of whatever Disney has sent through the de-animator this time, is it a matter of coming to it with the wrong expectations, or just expecting too much? There's charm here, and a periodic human pulse, even as the remake fights with its own frenetic shrillness to the bitter end, in an adaptation by screenwriters Chris Kekaniokalani Bright and Mike Van Waes sticking closely to the animated version, while adding 23 more minutes.
For newbies: Orphaned after the death of their parents, 6-year-old Lilo (Maia Kealoha), ostracized at school, is being raised by her devoted but harried teenage sister Nani (Sydney Agudong), nearing the age of adult guardianship. Nani has shelved her college dreams (already she has been accepted by the University of California-San Diego, a long way from Lilo and Hawaii) to become a marine biologist.
It's a somewhat wrenching family scenario, as was the animated feature a generation ago, with conflict introduced by the sisters' wary interactions with a skeptical social worker (Tia Carrere, who voiced Nani in the earlier version). The larger conflict is interstellar. Later nicknamed Stitch by Lilo, once he crash-lands his getaway spaceship near the sisters' house, the small blue maniac from somewhere Out There is an 'illegal genetic experiment' gone haywire, lab-created by scientist Jumba on a distant planet. The scientist, more hapless than mad, must retrieve Stitch in the name of the United Galactic Federation (Hannah Waddingham voices the imperious leader).
The live-action redo imagines Jumba and his cohort, the dippy Earth expert Pleakley, as aliens far more frequently depicted in human form, as played by Zach Galifianakis and Billy Magnussen. The former appears somewhat flummoxed by his material, guessing as to what kind of comic energy or tone would work. Meanwhile, Magnussen mugs hard enough to turn the audience into mugging victims, though as staged and edited, the ramshackle physical comedy dominating 'Lilo & Stitch' is more obstacle than answer.
Even with director Dean Fleischer Camp coming off the terrific and hilarious and moving 'Marcel the Shell With Shoes On' feature, based on the lovely Marcel short films, his handling of this material feels thwarted. It's a prefabricated commodity, and those are not easy to activate. The main problem? Violent physical comedy can succeed or fail a million different ways in the realms of animation, least well, probably, in photorealistic animation. Tellingly, the 2002 Disney movie was not photorealistic; its animated watercolor palette and more traditional, storybook visual approach let Lilo and Stitch be themselves, in a frenzy or in heartfelt reflection, and that approach worked.
But in live-action? Well, it's different, even if the story is the same. Watching people getting clobbered with mops, or Stitch making messes and starting fires at the open-air beach resort where Nani works — the funny's diminished in live-action. It's more bombastic, and more realistic. And those two qualities don't improve anything. Every action beat, and even the simplest dialogue exchanges, feel aggressively rushed and pushy here.
The saving graces are Agudong and Kealoha. Their characters' sibling relationship, fractious but loving, keeps at least five toes in the real world and in real feelings, thanks to the actors. 'Lilo & Stitch' always was a nutty collision of any number of films and stories, from 'Frankenstein' to 'E.T.' to any prior Disney project featuring two characters who might plausibly sing 'You've Got a Friend in Me' to each other. That song, of course, belongs to 'Toy Story,' but you get the idea.
While Disney has no financial imperative to modify a business plan centered on what they've already made — and for the record, the recent 'Snow White' was far from the worst of its recent remakes — they do have a creative imperative. They have an obligation to their own future, and to the film medium's. It can't be lost on the creative artists involved with each new Disney drag-and-drop, including 'Lilo & Stitch': Live-action recycling makes characters you know and love more 'real.' And too often, that realism comes with only trace elements of real charm, or magic.
'Lilo & Stitch' — 2 stars (out of 4)
MPA rating: PG (for action, peril, and thematic elements)
Running time: 1:48
How to watch: Premieres in theaters May 22

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