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Tagline: There's one in every family.

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A STITCH IN TIME
SAVES LILO

For the past three and a half years, I've been watching one Disney animated feature per month, in chronological order, beginning with SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS. This month, my 42nd, I was up to LILO & STITCH (2002). I figured, why not make this one a public event, an Unrandom Movie Club selection, and see if we can get some kids in here to watch along. So we did. We had our first kid-friendly Club meeting. Yup, in attendance - a batch of primitive humanoid lifeforms, and some kids came too.

Born out of a (failed) book idea Chris Sanders had back in 1985, L & S was repitched when Disney was looking for smaller stories that can triumph ("This generation's DUMBO") rather than a big concept movie. Sanders had done story work on such notables as THE LION KING, BEAUTY AND THE BEAST and ALADDIN; but this time out, along with Dean DeBlois, he sat in the director's swivel. He also did the voice of:

Stitch - A diminutive, lovable yet impetuous alien, illegally genetically engineered...mostly to destroy stuff. (By wacky coincidence, Stitch also happens to make a cute Disney plush.) A childlike mix of obnoxious/precocious, Stitch is soon banished from his planet, only to escape the prison transport and land on Earth, in Hawaii. At first Hawaii seems like the perfect place to land. A paradise. But we soon learn that Stitch isn't good with water.

Lilo - A diminutive, lovable yet impetuous girl prone to hitting people and messing things up. She's been relegated to orphandom due to her parents' grisly death in a car that plunged over a cliff and landed in a fireball of twisted metal and anguished death cries (I may have made that part up).

Stitch and Lilo are two of a kind - smart, but bratty and rebellious. The truth is, they're acting out (by, for example, biting the people who torment them) to cover their pain. They are orphaned ugly ducklings trying to figure out where they fit in. Bummed, Lilo immures herself in her house, listening to Elvis 45s (I'm not sure a 6 year old would be such an Elvis freak, nor play 45s, but okay).

At first, Stitch wants no part of Lilo's world, but it soon becomes a marriage of convenience. You see, Stitch's maker, the four-eyed jumbo Jumba (David Ogden Stiers), along with sidekick Pleakley (Kevin McDonald) are recruited to retrieve him. And Jumba and Pleakley can't capture Stitch as long as he's with Lilo, posing as her pet (Stitch morphs himself, sort of, into a dog, sort of). Meanwhile, Lilo and her sister/guardian Nani are being harassed by Mr. Bubbles (the deep-voiced Ving Rhames), a menacing child protective services guy. Sure, there's a lot going on, even a love story between Nani and surfer David (Tia Carrere and Jason Scott Lee, both actually from Hawaii), but the story is nice and clean. And the subtext of the oddball fitting in is clear.

Moving along at a brisk clip, there are wonderful moments in L & S, some big (when asked why not make something instead of destroying things, Stitch fashions the entire city of San Francisco using books, only to destroy it playing Godzilla) and others small (In their alien language, Stitch tells the people on his planet something so awful that a robot pukes metal gears). There are also the requisite Disney moments, like when Nani is about to give the animal adoption woman Susan Hegarty (played by dialect coach to the stars Susan Hegarty) the $2 fee, and Lilo says, "I wanna buy him!," only to ask Nani to borrow $2. That was warm and fuzzy, but there's also funny - Lilo to the menacing Mr. Bubbles: "Did you ever kill anyone?" Mr. Bubbles, after a beat: "We're getting off the subject."

I loved the animation; not just the rendering, but the movement. The way Stitch scampers, then pauses (for comedy) before he does things like close the refrigerator door with his foot. I've learned, post-viewing, that the animators went back to using watercolors for their backgrounds, a la DUMBO and SNOW WHITE (which as you've learned, I watched 42 months ago). And while we're talking animators, make sure you spot the running Cal Arts gag of their animation classroom number "A113," found in every Pixar and many Disney films, showing up here on the truck's license plate.

The 2-disc "Big Wave" edition has a 2 hour documentary which is exhaustingly fantastic (and 25% longer than the movie). From the germ of the idea (Stitch was a character 15 years before Lilo) through storyboards, character design, story, you name it. For you animation fans out there, I urge you to check this out. A word of caution, though; a lot of what we see occurs during production, when they're in the creative high, so it gets a bit too energetic and important at times, which is so good for them but often tiring for us. But we do learn things like them cutting a 747 airplane sequence immediately after 9/11. The plane was quickly replaced by a spaceship, done so by changing the actual plane's model on the computer. Fascinating and cool. Less fascinating and cool, we get to witness Sanders taking up skateboarding.

Other extras include a ten minute interview with Joe Grant a year before he died. Grant co-wrote DUMBO and designed both the witch and the queen in SNOW WHITE. At 96 years old, he still worked at Disney. Grant died at the storyboard table in his studio 7 days before his 97th birthday. Also on the 2-disc set, the way they marketed the movie by putting Stitch into famous Disney films like MERMAID, BEAST, and LION KING. Pretty crafty and really funny. If you don't want to rent/buy it, you can grab the spots off YouTube. Here's one for you to start with: http://goo.gl/sqngX

With all these extras, I sure found it funny how no one interviewed mentioned the similarities to E.T.; alien and kid, both outcast and lost, find each other and help each other. As mentioned earlier, the story's early incarnation was thought up by writer Sanders in 1985, three year's after E.T.'s release, when it was still very much in people's veins (and the year E.T. was re-released in theaters). Other similarities include E.T. and Stitch raiding their host's fridges and E.T. and Stitch using record players. I found a few other Spielberg nods, like Stitch crushing a can against his head like Quint in JAWS, and that Gremlins thing of getting them wet. Come to think of it, Stitch is a bit Gremliny.