Aliens behaving badly
Mark Steyn
The nice thing about Disney's Lilo and Stitch is the watercolour backgrounds. It's a technique that gave Snow White and Bambi a lot of their visual style, but one the studio's all but abandoned in the last half-century. It's part of the reason this film's animation, compared to recent Disney product, has a loose human feel to it. The characters are less successful: Lilo is a runty pug of a little girl, while her big sister Nani is a standard-issue Disney dolly who, as much as the Little Mermaid and Pocahontas. is too finished, no rough edges. There are six Elvis songs, including the great 'Rock-A-Hula Baby', plus space aliens, social workers and the usual heavyhanded PC moralising.
We begin in outer space. On a distant planet a mad scientist called Jumba is in trouble for genetically engineering a highly malevolent creature. Experiment 626, as the creature is known, looks like a monsterised version of Jerry the Mouse (from Tom And . . . ). He's blue, his ears are messed up, he's got a ton of arms, stegosaur-like prickles down his back and dangerous teeth. The creature is condemned to exile, but he hijacks the space ship and takes off for a remote outpost called Earth. The big cheese on the Galactic Federation Council wants to incinerate the planet and remove any possible threat from Experiment 626, but it's pointed out to her that Earth is a protected species habitat: it's a designated mosquito breeding ground.
Experiment 626, meanwhile, has come down in Hawaii. At this point, we meet Lilo and Nani. Their parents have died in a car crash. and Nani is now raising her little sister, or trying to. Lilo is a bratty little girl, disliked by her schoolmates, and Nani is somewhat frazzled and distracted even without her sibling. A somewhat menacing social worker arrives at a bad moment when Lilo's face down on the floor having a tantrum. He threatens to put the little girl in foster care unless Nani demonstrates she can hold a job and keep the kid under control. 'People treat me different,' says Lilo, and you pretty much know where this movie's going to go. So she wishes on a shooting star. 'I need someone to be my friend,' she pines. The star is. in fact, Experiment 626's spaceship falling to Earth. He somehow winds up in the local dog pound, where he retracts his multiple arms and spines and gives a passable impression of a lovable puppy when Lilo turns up looking for that new friend. She calls him Stitch and almost immediately he's trouble. He costs Nani her job and gets her into trouble with the social worker. But Lilo loves him. She plays him her Elvis records — vinyl, not CD — and he barks along in an Elvis jumpsuit. He soaks up contemporary pop culture randomly but intensely — building an elaborate city model in Lilo's bedroom and then trashing it as Godzilla. He has no sense of right and wrong — or rather he does but he prefers wrong.
So they're a good match. They're both cranky and rejected. He's alien, she's alienated. Ifs not too fanciful to suggest he's the physical embodiment of her rage. But then he starts to read The Ugly Duckling and feels vaguely that the story applies to him. Round about this time, we also start hearing the word 'ohana'. `Ohana' is an Hawaiian word meaning 'family' and 'unity' and 'nobody gets left behind', and, once it's been introduced, we hear it over and over. You sort of wish Stitch would chew somebody's limb off whenever anyone says `ohana'. But instead Lilo and Nani get to bandy it with impunity.
Fortunately. Stitch's creator Jumba has been dispatched to Earth with strict instructions to eliminate the errant creature. Accompanying Jumba is the nervous Pleakley, an eyeball-headed environmentalist who's more interested in studying the mosquitoes. The scene where they swarm to him and begin to chow down on his intergalactic blood is one of the best in the picture.
But, despite a very busy plot, Lilo and Stitch in the end goes nowhere. Its two principals are a concept, not a relationship. There's very little spark between them, Stitch in particular is a one-joke premise that you can't really flesh out, and so the `ohana' stuff and the rest of the shallow moralising seems unjustified by anything we actually see on screen. It's pleasant to see a movie with aliens and Elvis songs, hut it'd be a lot more fun if Elvis were the alien.
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