Lilo and Stitch
Review
by : Kyle
DuVall
Starring:
Tia Carrere, Jason Scott Lee, Daveigh Chase,
Chris Sanders
Directed by: Dean Deblois and Chris Sanders
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Its
been less than a decade since Pixar studios unleashed Toy
Story upon the world of family entertainment and people are
already driving nails into the coffin of traditional cel animation.
For many, the predicted demise of the old, hand-drawn frame
by frame animation is a knee-jerk reaction, one based on the
idea that 3-d, hyper detailed computer animation renders its
analog predecessors obsolete.
But film
is art, and art has no place for obsolescence. Photography
didn't kill painting, motion pictures didn't kill photography,
and a dozen Shreks, Toy Stories or Jimmy Neutrons can't kill
traditional animation when it is used to create something
as vibrant, magical and downright wondrous as Lilo and Stitch.
Lilo and
Stitch is a very smart animated film. It's not a film that
seeks to challenge CG animation on its own playing field,
it's a film that, on a technical level, embraces elements
that CG can't duplicate and never desperately tries to "prove"
some sort of technical equivalence to groundbreaking CG films
like Monsters Inc. or A Bug's Life. Lilo
and Stitch tells a simple, sweet story that is in perfect
harmony with its traditionally animated medium and the end
result is a film that is one of Disney studios best since
Uncle Walt shuffled off this mortal coil (or into an industrial
strength freezer, whichever you prefer…)
Lilo is
a very intimate tale when compared to Disney's epic tradition,
especially that of the last 2 decades. Its not about returning
the king of animals to his throne, its not about finding a
lost civilization beneath the sea, it's about a beleaguered
family who adopt a "dog" that is actually a genetically engineered
space-monster programmed for destruction and about how this
fluffy blue koala from hell teaches himself and his "owners"
what family really means.
But, of course, its got spaceships and explosions and aliens
with plasma guns too.
The film opens on a very epic scale, with a "galactic council"
of bizarre aliens, trying "idiot scientist" (who prefers to
be referred to as "evil genius")Jumba (David Ogden Stiers,
for the illegal creation of the most dangerous genetic mutation
in the galaxy: experiment 626. 626, despite being about the
size of a mid-sized dog and looking like a six armed, blue
Mogwai from Gremlins, is super strong, nearly indestructible
and has a penchant for space-language profanity that sends
the council into a swooning fit.
626 promptly
escapes capture and pilots a snazzy red police ship to a primitive
planet named "Earth". Marooned in Hawaii, 626 is mistaken
for a dog and winds up getting "adopted" by orphaned sisters
Nani (Tia Carrere) and Lilo (Daveigh Chase). Unfortunately,
a fugitive alien bent on destruction is the last thing Nani
and Lilo need. Older sister Nani is in constant danger of
losing custody of her younger, uncontrollable sister Lilo
due to Lilo's wild outbursts and mischevious nature. When
626, whom Lilo promptly and inexplicably names "Stitch" is
thrown in the mix, even Lilo, who has been a handful herself,
can't comprehend the hi-jinks that will ensue.
The first
thing that may strike you about Lilo and Stitch is the artwork,
especially in the backgrounds of the Hawaii sequences. The
scenery of tropical foliage and towering mountains is rendered
in a beautifully textured watercolor-illustration style that
gives the film the look of a wonderful, moving, children's
story book. The shaded tonally subtle, yet lavishly detailed
aesthetic is one that made Disney's early films like Snow
White and Pinnochio more than simply long form cartoons. It's
an aesthetic The company has lost sight of in the past decades,
with their contemporary films being dominated by heavily detailed
backgrounds that utilize solid, vibrant blocks of primary
color with little texture or tonal subtlety. The end result
of such a style is usually a technically dazzling film with
complex animation but absolutely no tactile quality. Whereas
the Disney classics had the look of beautifully illustrated
children's novels, their latter day counterparts merely resemble
very elaborate cartoons. But Lilo represents a return to the
illustrated quality of early Disney. Not only is it visually
striking, with every shot looking like a color plate form
a beautiful storybook, but you can almost feel the texture
of the film's settings by merely looking. Even mundane locations,
like Lilo's house are imbued the whimsical, atmosphere and
beauty of Gepetto's workshop or the dwarfs' cottage. That
the everyday world of Lilo and Nonnie's Hawaii can look as
magical as Peter Pan's Neverland is a triumph of design, craftsmanship
and imagination on the part of Disney's animators.
Of course,
none of this would amount to much if the story and characters
all these pretty pictures are designed to support lacked heart.
Fortunately, the film also features some of the most well
rounded and engaging characters seen in any animated film,
and the plotting shows both a generosity of imagination and
affection for the characters that makes the rather small scale
story of Lilo and Stitch as magical as any of the studios
fairy tale epics.
That Nani
and Lilo's family, where single, big sister Nani is struggling
to raise precocious, problematic Lilo, is unconventional goes
without saying, but Lilo and Stitch makes this element more
than an obligatory play for sympathy.
Little
Lilo occupies the place of the uber-cute, bright and curious
yet misunderstood child in the narrative, but unlike other
incarnations of this archetype in other family films the filmmakers
are not afraid to make Lilo's personality genuinely problematic.
Lilo is adorable, no doubt about that, and wonderfully funny,
imaginative and eccentric, but she can also be intractably
bratty and has a temper problem. Lilo gets put-upon by her
more adjusted more mundane classmates which evokes instant
sympathy, but Lilo's quick temper is shown pretty early, so
the film doesn't absolve Lilo completely of blame for her
separation from the other kids.
Nani,
likewise, serves as the sympathetic, single caregiver with
the responsibilities of the world stacked against her. In
a lesser film, her character would be crafted as an innocent
in a world where everything seems cruelly contrived to rip
Lilo away from her. Lilo and Stitch certainly wrings sympathy
out of Nanie' struggle to be both a parent and a sister, and
we do feel the deck is stacked against her, but even moreso,
the audience sees nani's woes as the result of both nani's
inexperience as a parent and the unique, sometimes troubled
personality of Lilo. Lilo and stitch doesn't take the contrived
easy route to our sympathies. We see Lilo and Nani's faults,
even when, by its very nature, the film must focus on their
charms.
Even Stitch,
the film's mischievous and cuddly animal sidekick, is more
complicated than one would expect. When the malicious little
furball first meets Lilo, there's no instant, moony eyed love
for the little moppet, the planet toppling savage is not instantly
tamed by Lilo's innocent spirit. Stitch acts like a pushy,
wild little menace at first. And although he's often forced
to play act as a cuddly canine to avoid being blasted into
oblivion by aliens sent to re-capture him, he's not terribly
good at at being a dog. He breaks things, he snarls, he eats
too much and generally gives everyone around him a hard time.
Of course, convention demands that Stitch eventually grows
attached to his foster family and in the end learns that love
can overwhelm even the worst, most destructive faults of his
literal "bad breeding", but Stitch's journey to this state,
one full of great comic misadventures and some scenes of prodigious
warmth and charm, is not instantaneous or cheap. It's heartfelt
and sincere and very funny.
And, above
all, this is a fun film. The comedic performances and scenarios
Disney's animators orchestrate in Lilo and Stitch are wonderful.
Whether its pure out-and-out gags like Stitch lipsynching
"Blue Suede Shoes" in an Elvis jumpsuit, or moments of pristine
comic timing and pacing like Lilo's "Heartbreak Hotel" moping
in the films first act, the artists behind the film, the ones
drawing each scene frame by frame, are in complete command
of all the comedic and sentimental tones of the story. It's
a film that really gets the viewer to appreciate that animators
aren't simply visual artists, but actors directors, and in
a sense, cinematographers all at the same time.
Other
reviewers have categorized Lilo and Stitch as some sort of
anomaly, an anti-Disney Disney film more akin to the Warner
Brothers tradition than the house of the mouse. This is a
bit of a misnomer. True, Stitch is a character more in line
with Bugs Bunny or the Tasmanian Devil than Jiminy Cricket
or Timon and Pumbaa, but at its core, Lilo and Stitch is still
a Disney flick. Its sentimental, affirming and even in its
looniest moments it doesn't delve into the zany cynicism that
often enlivened the adventures of Bugs and his pals.
Instead
this is a Disney film that blends an ambition to create stronger,
more well-rounded charcters and more textured distinctive
art with a determination to create a more personal, smaller,
more character-driven story than the Disney epics of the past
few years. Since Pixar's computer animated films have come
to the forefront of family entertainment, the beleaguered
traditional animation divisions of Disney and other studios
have responded by making "bigger" more technically complex
animated fare, stretching the technical limits of cel animation
and often unsuccessfully reaching for the grandiose at every
turn (see Atlantis and this summer's Spirit). Lilo and Stitch
represents a change in strategy, one that realizes that, more
than the technical advances evident in the Toy Story Films,
or Shrek, those films' breakout success was rooted in the
hearts of their characters and the spirit of the stories they
told. Lilo has Heart and wonderful, funny, engaging characters
that forge real emotional connections to the audience, and
its also a film that trades on the textural and tonal superiority
of Cel animation over CG animation to great expressive effect.
Lilo and Stitch is not the last gasping breath of traditional
animation at Disney, it's a rallying cry, a template for other
cel animation features to follow, not to mention a wonderfully
fun and affecting little film.
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