Stitch Theory
Fran Magazine: Issue #147 - A guest post by Clare
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Fran here: Last Monday, I saw the live-action remake of Disney’s Lilo & Stitch. I don’t think this movie is very good, but I love Stitch and I cried through the last half hour anyway for reasons that more or less escaped me at the time of viewing. Several weeks ago, Clare of Famous and Beloved Newsletter asked if she could review the remake for Fran Magazine. I said, yes, duh. The below is Clare’s take on the film with a few asides from me in the footnotes. Enjoy!
THE POLITICAL
Here are two situations I don’t understand:
1) Complaining about remakes, sequels, and cash grabs as if they are novel phenomena. The first Mission: Impossible movie (1996) came out 6 years after a failed revival of an eponymous TV show that ended only 23 years before that. The first two Star is Borns are 22 years apart. Mickey Mouse cartoons ran from 1928-1952 before stop-and-go revivals ran from 1982-2019.
Film is a capitalist medium. It started as theme park rides and contemporaneously AI-resonant spectacles of American progressivism. In 2002, Disney only greenlit Lilo & Stitch because the then-president of Feature Animation wanted a “Dumbo for our generation.” This is a company that, since before the Great Depression, has made money by exploiting childhood wonder through technological spectacle. Some of the products of this system — like that of the cinematic medium, itself — are good and fun to watch. This is not something that is difficult to understand.
2) Not liking animals. Humans and dogs evolved alongside one another. Many of the nonhuman animals we encounter day to day are, in fact, invented by imperialism to be our social companions or capitalist tools. And yet, something like a dog accomplishes something human technology could never come close to achieving, as we cannot even understand it: these creatures cannot be socialized. They don’t understand norms and histories or expectations beyond your interaction with them. They know nothing except trust, distrust, happiness, and discomfort. Your relation to nonhuman animals epitomizes your relation to your own nature. How alienated are you?
THE PERSONAL
When I recall my childhood, my parents are there, my friends and school are there, but at the center of my mind are dogs. I grew up with what feels like a million of them, but specifically Spurt, Lola, Puff, and DJ were my companions: always interested in my presence when my friends or parents understandably had something better to do. Amidst any emotional turmoil of my youth, Spurt could not conceptualize my anguish. He would simply be there for me, totally unwilling to see anything wrong with me or my life, at all. He had to be put down when I was in the 6th grade, which was humiliatingly traumatic for me. His mind was intact but his 14-year-old body didn’t work, and he was in so much pain that for the first time in our entire lives he didn’t want to be around me; he wanted something bigger than our house could give him, a relief in death he might have understood but I could not. The trauma of this death was not so much in the loss of my Spurt, though, as it was in the breakdown of our communication. I had watched other beloved pets die, but Spurt’s inability to understand human emotion that had always made our bond so special is what made his death impossible to cope with. I couldn’t ask him if he was okay with what was happening or what I should do to help him, even though I felt like his life had been dedicated to sitting next to me.
I wrote about the experience of my Puff dying last year, which was very different but almost worse. I was living at my parents — her house — on and off at the time, the first time I had since I was 17. Even though I was there, I was gone when she fell really ill, and came back only a day before she passed. She was very confused and old and sick and so I wasn’t unaccepting of her death, I just still feel an insurmountable guilt that I didn’t really say goodbye. I was busy having fun and a boyfriend and a job, but she wasn’t, nor did she care that I wasn’t there. I feel shame both for not caring and for not learning enough from her selflessness. I imagine what I’m feeling is, like, when parents make you feel guilty for not spending time with them as an adult, or whatever. I don’t have that so much with my parents — I didn’t ask to be born, and they’re just people — but I feel it for my DJ. He was hit by a car when he was a baby and got a bionic hip. Now he’s 8 years old and his hip bothers him and I live across the country. He doesn’t care, which makes me feel worse. I’m being Beau is Afraided by my dogs.
THE STITCH
I have always loved Lilo & Stitch because I was 5 when it came out which is the perfect age to be when Stitch is invented. There is some nostalgic Pavlovian response to the sight of Stitch, sure, in that I am inherently wowed by his appearance on merchandise or whatever. But the movie is also just pretty good/cute. Though, I can never rewatch it because the ending makes me cry too much because it makes me think about what would happen if my dogs could, actually, talk, and how they might feel like Stitch if they had to say goodbye when they died.
This is normal, I think, because a lot of the original Lilo & Stitch is meant to make you cry so that your emotionally developing brain becomes forever invested in this IP (they built a whole film studio on this premise and it’s called PIXAR and its movies SUCK!!!). But it’s also just normal to think about your dog when you see Stitch and be emotionally moved. Stitch is a dog.1
Lilo & Stitch, the movie, is about what a dog can do for a family. You adopt one that has no other family, no other means of survival, has been outcast from a world it didn’t ask to be a part of, but it overcomes so much more than humans are able to and so much more quickly. You inevitably get more from the dog than you ever initially think is possible. It is really annoying but it’s so cute and you feel so much responsibility for its contentedness you put up with stuff you never thought you would. WHO’S ADOPTING WHO.
But Lilo & Stitch is also about an impossibly cute child and even cuter creature getting into trouble in the fabulous milieu of the Hawaiian Islands. Stitch is not a sacred being. The more Stitch I am shown the better. CGI Stitch, puppet Stitch, Stitch as an idea, Stitch on merchandise: all of this is fine. And if they make the same movie they made before with some actors I like and a real child that is cute — so be it.
The new Lilo & Stitch is a 5-star children’s motion picture. It pivots the figure of Stitch — a Mickey-Mouse-eque symbol of our culture for the last two decades — from a totally fantastical cartoon one-off to a legitimate character in a movie about family. In the new version, everything is the same, except Stitch has to have more tangible emotional beats and the plotline about Lilo and Nani being orphans2 and poor can’t just get tossed around willy-nilly. But this is all navigated well, as Stitch has become even cuter because he looks and seems like a real thing I could interact with.
“But we don’t need another Stitch!” Maybe you don’t. I might.
Not one person in the Western world can gaze upon the original Lilo & Stitch without the blurry lens of nostalgia. In my case, it’s nostalgia for my own childhood and for learning what Elvis is and for all my dogs that were alive when Stitch was introduced to me. But it might be nostalgia for when your child was young or for the way animation looked in 2002. We need to admit that Lilo & Stitch is not, formally or stylistically, as good of a movie as Beauty and the Beast or Emperor’s New Groove. That’s okay, because Stitch as a creature is better and more important than the sum of those other movies’ parts. But be serious.
In the original, it could not be clearer that there are three versions of a screenplay stitched together with three separate villains: Russian and gay guy Jumba and Pleakley, Ving Rhames’ Cobra Bubbles, and “Captain Gantu.” No one likes or cares about Captain Gantu, and if you do you’re a moron.3 The new Lilo & Stitch gets rid of him entirely: GOOD. “Oh, goo goo ga ga, the new one takes away the whimsy of Ving Rhames playing a social worker” — too fucking bad! “Agent Cobra Bubbles” is a dumb joke for children that doesn’t really please me that much, and its cringeness is attenuated in New Stitch by him simply being in the CIA. “Ohhhh the color and vibrancy of 2D animation has been lost because now Stitch looks like he lives in the same world as me.” ENOUGH!!!!
I want to touch Stitch. I want him to be sitting on my lap right now or crawling around the walls. I have been looking at 2D Stitch for my entire life. Now I get to have a Stitch that is real, in my imagination and in the texts that I consume. Stitch has never been more of a dog or a character or a guy with a hilarious body and disposition. This should do nothing but delight us all.
The actors in New Stitch are good. There is a child who is cute, a sister who is fine, and Billy Magnussen who delivers one of the best comedy performances of the last 5 years: YES! Ok, the sister carries Stitch while walking on the ocean floor because Stitch is so heavy, so she looks like she’s competing in the Olympics and Stitch is a weight, which made me laugh out loud. Ok, the director is responsible for Marcel the Shell. Ok, Disney should pay for original ideas instead of the same thing over and over. Whatever.
I cried from the second New Stitch started to the second it ended and then all the way home. It has been a tough year and I miss Puff. Animals are amazing. I was in awe, watching Stitch, at how amazing they are. Stitch is so funny. I was in awe of this. I was in awe of the indigenous beauties of the Hawaiian Islands. I love Elvis so much. Stitch is real. He looks like my other dog Ojo. Stitch is with me, in my heart. New Stitch caused me to reconnect with myself and my youth, to think fondly on my memories of my dogs, to remember that they are never lost to time.
I love old Stitch, and I love new Stitch. They should make 100 more Stitches. The Stitches should kill the Minions. I love you, Stitch, I love you Lilo. I love you Nani and David, and Pleakley too.
Fran note: I was on Stitch’s wikipedia page the other day and learned that Stitch’s “occupation” is literally “dog.”
Fran note: there’s a very funny (to me) Twitter controversy unfolding due to a viral tweet that claims at the end of the Lilo & Stitch remake, Nani surrenders Lilo to “the state.” This is hilarious: what actually happens is that Nani lets David’s family adopt Lilo so she can go to college. In high school, a friend’s mom died and his only other family was his sister, a freshman in college. His best friend’s family took over guardianship of him. Is this surrendering someone to “the state”? Bffr.
Fran note: I DO care that Captain Gantu was cut and blogged about it here.
 | A guest post by
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I wish Clare had the portal gun from Stitch so that she could see her dogs whenever she wanted.
My childhood dog was named Mystic and she was a massive golden retriever and I loved her and the tip of her nose smelled and she burped in my face every time I cried and I literally miss her all the time . Stitch is my favorite creature alive. Stitch is real to me. I loved the stitch cartoon because I wanted to hold all the creatures on it, stitch most of all.