June 3rd, 2022 
Michael Lyons 
Before Lilo & Stitch debuted in theatres, no one knew what to expect. Disney launched an extremely creative marketing campaign with teaser trailers that featured Stitch appearing in scenes from Disney’s animated features Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, and The Lion King. In the trailers, the blue creature that was a combination of thing-from-another-world strangeness and compellingly cuddly, would interrupt iconic scenes from these features, wreaking havoc. These were coupled with a poster featuring Stitch front and center, with famous Disney characters from Pinocchio to the Genie around him, but all looked terrified. The tagline read: “There’s one in every family.”
The ingenious promotion heralded the fact that Stitch, and his movie, were both going to be unlike the friendly, familiar Disney that had come before. It was a brilliant move because that’s precisely what Lilo & Stitch was, and, twenty years later, the character and the film still stand as extremely offbeat originals.
And yet, there is a surprisingly emotional core in Lilo & Stitch and one that still allows the film to resonate with audiences two decades later.
Set in Hawaii, the film centers on Lilo, a young, offbeat girl who lives with her older sister, Nani, as their parents have passed away. Lilo adopts what she thinks is a dog from a local shelter, who she names Stitch (she even shares her love of Elvis with her adopted pet, which adds a fun element to the film’s soundtrack).
It turns out that Stitch is a dangerous, genetically enhanced alien named “experiment 626,” who has escaped from his home planet and landed on earth. Here, he is being pursued by two other aliens, Dr. Jumba Jookiba, who created Stitch, and Galactic Federation Agent Pleakley.
In the book Lilo & Stitch: Collected Stories from the Film’s Creators, Chris Sanders, the co-director and co-writer of the film (with Dean DeBlois), recalled how he had first created an early version of Stitch as far back as 1985 and even built a story around him.
In the late ‘90s, while a story artist at Disney, during the studio’s Renaissance, Sanders discussed in the book how Disney artists “…expressed a secret desire to make a Sleepy Hollow or a Dumbo – small, strange stories with more heart than budget, made when animation was an unexplored frontier.”
Sanders also discusses how he got his chance to pitch his idea to Thomas Schumacher, President of Walt Disney Feature Animation, over dinner one evening, which Sanders states he did in “a minute and a half.” Schumacher liked the idea and, as Sanders remembered: “Stitch was awake at last.”
Lilo & Stitch indeed would herald back to those more modest Disney animated classics. “From the beginning, the idea of keeping it small was a banner we hung over every aspect of the film,” DeBlois stated in Lilo & Stitch: Collected Stories from the Film’s Creators.
The production was even done at Disney’s Feature Animation Studio in Florida, located at the then-Disney/MGM Studios theme park, which had a smaller team of artists.
The look of the film came to life through watercolor backgrounds, a style that hadn’t been used in some time, and brings the lush locales of Hawaii to life in a unique, beautiful way.
The two title characters in the film were true standouts. Lilo (with the voice of Daveigh Chase and animated by Andreas Deja) is such a rich personality, a young girl with a knowing, mature soul. Stitch (voiced by Sanders himself, with Alex Kupershmidt animating) is a great anti-hero: monstrous in his early scenes and filled with heart and emotion as the film concludes.
The rest of the voice cast in Lilo & Stitch included Tia Carrere as Nani, Jason Scott Lee as her surfer friend, David, Ving Rhames as the stoic social worker Cobra Bubbles, David Ogden Stiers as Dr. Jookiba, Kevin McDonald as Pleakley, Kevin Michael Richardson as Captain Gantu from the Galactic Federation, who comes looking for Stitch, and Zoe Caldwell as the Federation’s Grand Councilwoman.
Celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, Lilo & Stitch was released on June 21, 2002, and was well-received by both critics and audiences. The latter responded to the character of Stitch and his edgier, troublemaking personality.
Direct-to-video sequels and a series followed, and the character continues to be a favorite, as evidenced by the continual Disney merchandise and theme park appearances and being featured prominently at Disney’s Aulani Resort in Hawaii (naturally).
Both Lilo & Stitch, the characters, and the film continue to be embraced, proving that the early marketing campaign stating, “There’s one in every family,” was spot-on. Lilo & Stitch, with its off kilter cast and story, tells of unconditional love and how our family (or “Ohana”) can come from everywhere. Two decades later, these are not alien notions and are still completely relatable.
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