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When it comes to live-action Disney movie remakes, it feels like fans continue to be divided over whether they should stick to the source material or bring something new to the beloved stories we fell in love with in the animated medium. As we get ready for the Lilo & Stitch release date, the director has pointed out one major reason this remake will be different from the original, and I think it’s worth knowing before going in.
The new Lilo & Stitch on the 2025 movie schedule is directed by Dean Fleischer Camp, who is best known for making the A24 darling, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On. When the filmmaker spoke to translating the beloved 2002 classic into a new medium, he had this to say:
[Stitch’s] whole thing is destruction, and so much of the comedy of the character comes from that impulse. Violence actually is very difficult to do; it just lands very differently. In an animated film, you could have a really goofy 10-car pile-up on the freeway, but I would challenge any live-action director to make a 10-car pile-up really funny. We had to figure out ways to soften the things that didn’t work in live action, but also find new things that we could do that the animated movie couldn’t.
This is such a solid point! While a lot of Disney fans are already interested in how Lilo & Stitch will differ from the original, especially after a lot of the footage we’ve seen looks almost identical to the original, these comments from the director to EW have opened my eyes to how the two movies might be different.
As Fleischer Camp shared, in the animated movie, Stitch spends most of the runtime running around destroying things, but in a live-action film, that just won’t play as well. So, the filmmaker decided to spend more time playing to the live-action medium’s strengths, like going “deeper on the relationships,” particularly between Lilo and her sister Nani.
During the interview, the director said it was important to him that the sister dynamic felt like a “real lived experience” and was really something the movie digs “deep” into this time around. As you may remember, during the runtime of Lilo & Stitch, Lilo is in danger of being torn from her sister by social services, and the arrival of Stitch and their misadventures only makes things worse. Check out the latest trailer for the remake below:
Dean Fleischer Camp also shared another element of Lilo & Stitch that he decided needed to be different to work in live-action: Pleakley and Jumba. In the original, they are aliens who wear “terrible” human disguises to blend in (with Pleakley memorably cross-dressing). However, as the filmmaker shared, it’s just not as believable to see aliens hidden in plain sight in live action, so he had the characters wear “human skins” in the form of Zach Galifianakis and Billy Magnussen while on Earth.
We’ve seen a lot of live-action Disney movies over the years, but Lilo & Stitch is the first to be based on a Disney animated film from the 2000s. The studio had not great luck with Snow White a couple of months ago, and its performance reportedly stalled the Tangled remake, but we have a feeling this could be the best one yet from this trend.
We can officially compare and contrast the two movies when Lilo & Stitch comes to theaters on May 23.