Lilo and Stitch know how to be a family
I love Disney movies – have I said that before? I also love Elvis music and the ocean, so I was looking forward to the new movie “Lilo & Stitch”. The trailers for the movie, where Stitch appears in clips of other Disney films whose characters implore him to get his own movie, were creative, albeit a bit annoying after a while.
And that’s the key word – annoying. Stitch is an annoying little alien, but he grows on you.
Stitch, otherwise known as Experiment 626, is an experimental creature designed to destroy. The movie starts with his creator, the evil scientist Jumba, voiced by perennial Disney favorite David Ogden Stiers, on trial. Stitch is deemed an illegal genetic experiment and banished to exile on an abandoned asteroid. In transit, he hijacks a police cruiser and escapes to earth. Jumba and Pleakley, a Cultural Contamination Specialist with the Galactic Federation, are ordered to capture him and sent to earth as well.
That’s when the opening credits start, so I took a few seconds and leaned over to my kids, who had seen the movie before: “Is Stitch a good guy or a bad guy?” I asked.
“A good guy,” they both answered.
Okay. I guessed I needed to be a little patient.
We meet Lilo then, an orphaned girl living with her teenaged sister. Lilo, we realize, has a lot of latent hostility, which she takes out on her acquaintances and her sister. Her sister, Nani, voiced by Tia Carrere, offers to buy her a faithful friend at the dog pound. By this point Stitch has been captured by Hawaiian officials and, because he has hidden two of his six legs, assumed to be a very ugly dog and taken to the dog pound.
So far, the movie is starting out a little un-Disney-like. At first sight, the lead characters are not likable. Stitch is not cuddly, although Lilo is cute. Lilo, voiced by 11-year-old Daveigh Chase, and Nani are under surveillance by a social worker, a big African American man named Bubbles whose knuckles sport the letters COBRA. Bubbles, voiced by Ving Rhames, has given Nani three days to prove she is providing a fit home for her sister or the two will be split up. And with Stitch thrown into the mix, the task of seeming like a perfect home environment becomes even more difficult.
Okay. The characters have been introduced. The situation has been established. The goal has been set. What will make it all come together?
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