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'Lilo & Stitch' Movie Review: Disney’s Remake Brings the Feels But Not the Soul
The live-action remake finds its humour and emotion with relative ease.
A deranged genius, Dr. Jumba Jookiba (Zach Galifianakis), creates a nefarious weapon: a genetically engineered extraterrestrial creature with naturally destructive tendencies and immense plushie potential. Dubbed Experiment 626, the blue koala-like being (voiced again by Chris Sanders, who also co-wrote the 2002 original) is deemed illegal by the Grand Councilwoman (Hannah Waddingham, imperious and perfect as ever) of the United Galactic Federation and swiftly exiled. Naturally, 626 escapes, crash-landing on Earth.
On our little blue planet, two orphaned sisters, Lilo (Maia Kealoha) and Nani (Sydney Agudong), are struggling to keep their small family afloat. Lilo, isolated and eccentric, is looking for a friend. Nani is fighting to retain custody of her sister while balancing the pressures of young adulthood. Into their lives crashes Stitch, the escaped alien menace, who becomes their dog, their problem, and eventually, an unlikely part of their ‘ohana.
Jumba and Earth “expert” Pleakley (Billy Magnussen) are dispatched on a mission to retrieve Stitch. Stitch, meanwhile, is on a mission to escape capture and sow chaos wherever he lands. Lilo just wants a friend. There’s a shooting star moment that plays suspiciously like Seth MacFarlane’s Ted (2012). It implies that if you wish for a friend from the cosmos, you almost always get a foul-tempered creature who trashes your house but tugs at your heart. Meanwhile, I’m on a mission to find something good to say about a Disney live-action remake after this year's Snow White. And against all odds, all of these missions might just be possible.
I don’t remember everything from the 2002 Lilo & Stitch. I remember laughing at Stitch’s comic violence, the soft watercolour backdrops of Hawaii, and watching the Hindi dub on television. But I do remember feeling something. Going into Dean Fleischer Camp’s 2025 live-action remake, that’s all I really wanted: to feel something again.
To that end, Lilo & Stitch delivers. It’s a serviceable remake. One of the more bearable entries in Disney’s ongoing assault on its own animated canon. The film finds its humour and emotion with relative ease. There’s a sincerity here that many of its predecessors lack. The humour, however, leans unexpectedly dry — almost deadpan — and often feels pitched toward adults. I caught myself wondering: do kids today have more evolved comic instincts than we did? Have I been ignoring the exponential rise of human intelligence? Right on cue, Stitch spat on an alien, and a theatre full of children erupted in laughter. Existential crisis averted.
There’s plenty to enjoy here. The chemistry between Lilo and Stitch is genuinely sweet. Kealoha plays Lilo with a prickly vulnerability that never slides into precociousness. But perhaps more compelling is how this version expands Nani’s role, giving her more interiority this time around. She’s not just the default caregiver but a young woman allowed to be angry, frustrated, and hopeful. Her dreams matter here, and Sydney Agudong plays her with a lived-in tenderness that feels like the film’s most valuable update.
But the film’s flaws are difficult to ignore. Most glaringly, it’s edited like a streaming movie: quick, patchy, and engineered to hold the attention of Cocomelon addicts. It rarely lets a moment breathe. In rushing from plot point to plot point, it loses some of the emotional gravity the original held so delicately. In its effort to be efficient, you can almost feel the MBA grad in the editing suite, tapping their smartwatch and whispering, “Move it along.”
The CGI is often cut-rate, particularly in scenes that demand spectacle. It seems like the production was trying to save as much effects budget as possible. Hence Jumba and Pleakley largely appear in human form, which does at least give Galifianakis and Magnussen room for physical comedy (a not unwelcome trade-off). Still, the whole thing feels more like a high-end Disney Channel production than a theatrical film. Fans of the original might not walk away angry, but they might walk away underwhelmed.
There’s also something fundamentally different about watching cartoon mayhem versus photorealistic destruction. In the original, Stitch demolishing a house was funny because it was slapstick in pastel colours. Here, it feels genuinely alarming. The realism, instead of grounding the story, undercuts its chaos. The comedy of mess becomes stress.
Which is why, even as this Lilo & Stitch remake mostly follows the story beats of Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois’s beloved 2002 film, it ends up feeling off. Not because the script falters or the actors stumble, but because the format simply can’t replicate the original’s emotional alchemy. The texture, the spirit, the soul is wrong. Despite all of these roadblocks, somehow, the film still manages to hold onto you with muscle memory; it remembers enough to make you feel, even if it no longer cares enough to feel with you.