Lilo & Stitch
- Release Date: May 23, 2025
- Director: Dean Fleischer Camp
- Primary Cast: Billy Magnussen, Chris Sanders, Courtney B. Vance, Hannah Waddingham, Maia Kealoha, Sydney Agudong, Tia Carrere, Zach Galifianakis
- Screenplay: Chris Kekaniokalani Bright, Mike Van Waes
- Release Platform: Theatrical
- Subgenre: Comedy, Family
- Rating: PG
- Runtime: 108 minutes
Synopsis
In this live-action remake of Disney's 2002 animated classic, a lonely Hawaiian girl befriends a mischievous alien engineered for destruction, sparking an adventure that redefines the meaning of family.
Review
Let’s get this out of the way: Lilo and Stitch (2025) is a 2-star movie. The core issue is extreme tonal inconsistencies. The film uneasily oscillates between screwball, gross-out comedy and genuine family drama. And it’s jarring. The animated original got away with this because, well, it was a cartoon. As seasoned movie goers, we’re pretty much trained at this point to accept a level of perceived absurdity when it comes to most animated fare, especially Disney outings.
The 2002 version subverted expectations by internalizing the stakes and dialing up the chaos (a PG-rated animated Disney film in 2002? A rarity indeed!). The 2025 edition attempts the same without accounting for its real-life trappings, and it makes no effort to meaningfully adjust the story to this new format. To make things worse, it awkwardly tries to copy scenes from the original beat-for-beat—and it just doesn’t work. One can pay homage without resorting to full-on emulation.
But my 8-year old loved it, and that’s really all that matters. So it gets an extra star for that.