Tooki ba waba!
18 August 2025
It's a very special ocassion for me, because I am watching ALL of Stitch.
Okay, on second thought, that may be a bit of a lie. There is a possibility I won't be watching the newest live action version of Lilo & Stitch. I haven't watched it, I don't have any interest in watching it, and honestly, I have my doubts as to whether I would enjoy it if I did, given the rage-filled comments I've been reading about it and how they've piled on top of my original disinterest. Such is the bane of the internet, it offers as much joy as it sucks out of me sometimes.
In any case, this post is not about live action Stitch, it's about all the rest of the franchise, so now that I've got that one out of the way, let's get into it!
Why am I watching Stitch now?
So, it had been a looong long while for me since I'd last watched any of the Stitch movies. Unless I am going through a particularly insane time, I am generally not the kind of person who'll rewatch movies a million times. Not anymore, at least; I would definitely play my favorite DVDs over and over and over and over again when I was a child, but since I started getting into written roleplay and making my own characters and stories myself, the urge to rewatch media quickly declined. Nowadays, I don't mind an occasional rewatch, though a rewatch is generally either something I really look forward to because it's been a long time and I feel I can find something new/useful in it; or because I'm excited about watching it with someone else, and knowing their experience. Generally, I'd say it's actually the movies I feel have touched me the most or hit me the hardest that I get most... let's say careful? about rewatching. It's a bit like to me they are treasures, and they would get worn out and "disrespected" if I decided to have them play on as background noise. Maybe it's silly, but I gotta give the art (and, let's be honest, also my own time and energy) the respect it deserves. My day is much too busy and my personal creative time is sort of limited, so if I get time to watch something, I would like that time to be spent meaningfully. Of course, it's my relaxing movie time, but it's also a chance I'm taking to experience something new, be up to date with the fresh ideas my fellow creatives are putting out there.
All of that said, I did recently rewatch the original Lilo & Stitch movie, when my best friend told me they wanted to watch it in order to "cure their heart from the latest live action version". That wasn't what kickstarted my Stitch marathon, though. Interestingly... It was one of my visits to the library.
I feel like I should make an entirely new post to talk about what I've been learning from going to the library every day this summer, but that's gonna be a topic for another day. The point is, about a week ago I was browsing through their DVD collection, and I found that they had Stitch!: The Movie in there. The surge of nostalgia was IMMEDIATE. I had watched this DVD so many times as a kid, and I'm 100% sure it's still sitting there in the same DVD folder sleeve, in the same shelf in the same place in my grandmother's house. I'm not entirely sure why I decided to take it with me and watch it again, it's not like I didn't remember the plot, but I just really wanted to look at it again, like really look at it from my current perspective as an artist. I wanted to look at the animation and the character designs, specifically. I knew that, compared to the quality of the original Lilo & Stitch, this movie was considered cheap animation back then, but I also knew that this movie had always been really enjoyable for me. Man, of course I could see the economy in the work and how some things don't look as polished as in the og movies. I can see that there were different artists working on this from the og movies. But boy, is it earnest. Boy, is it still utterly beautiful and pleasant to look at, and surely took so much tireless work to make. Boy, is it faithful to the original material, from the kind of story it tells, to the writing, to the art direction, to the character and creature designs, to going so far as to develop an actual cohesive alien vocabulary from the gibberish of the first movie (I read about this today while I was browsing for a fun title to this post, haha). Boy, is it just so genuinely and passionately Stitch.
And I love Lilo & Stitch. I really, really love Lilo & Stitch, like, the franchise in its entirety. As a kid I was obsessed with all of the other little experiments too. I distinctly remember going through the extras of my Stitch!: The Movie DVD and listening to the little trivia descriptions about them again and again, as if I was a scientist or a collector myself looking through my experiment files. I love that I could rewatch this movie from an actual, genuine DVD copy, because I could go once again through the extras as well.
I don't know when exactly my interest in Stitch faded. To be completely fair, at the time I joined fandom, the hottest thing was How to Train Your Dragon, and I was so insanely obsessed with it that probably everything else I liked faded away, as it tends to happen with these things. But also there was an element of... I don't know whether to call it "cringe". Listen, it's just that, for all the great storytelling and heart and meaning and COMEDY GOLD that the Stitch franchise has to offer, I never really came across a genuine fandom for it, or even genuine commentary/reactions to the characters or story, and that pains me because there's SO MUCH character to talk about. Stitch seems to have only stuck onto the collective consciousness as this stinkin' cute, fluffy mascot that gets plastered all over t-shirts and cozy pajamas (usually together with Toothless, who suffered a similar treatment). Anyway, I guess that maybe to my teenage brain, liking Stitch was a bit "too mainstream", so I kind of let the little alien just sit politely in the back of my mind like the cute little mascot he was.
Anyway... Watching Stitch!: The Movie I had the sudden realization that yeah, it was indeed just a feature-length introduction to the Lilo & Stitch Series, a villain-of-the-day type of show where Lilo and Stitch meet each of Stitch's equally destructive cousins, and find new homes and families for them.
To my own surprise, I don't think I ever, like... actually watched the series. I know it existed, I know it aired on Disney Channel España, and I even recall catching little snippets of it sometimes, when it happened to be on TV. But I never really sat on schedule to watch the episodes in order, or at all. In my house, TV time never worked like that. TV time was whenever there was nothing else to do (and trust me, in my family there was always something). Plus, the scheduling of the show probably didn't work in my favor. Which is all to say... I went just a little insane there for a bit. This was one of those little moments of realizing you are actually an adult, and you can actually do what you want and couldn't do as a child, and it's never too late to FINALLY get to meet all the little evil experiments you were excited for as a child. So I found a torrent for the show. Soooo many episodes... Actual heaven... I would have loved to have it in eurospanish, but dubs are getting harder and harder to find for old TV cartoons, so it'll be english for now. I also downloaded the anime series and that one chinese mini-series they made, and plan to watch those next. The anime is also something I had previously ignored, perhaps out of spite, because I felt like by removing Lilo and the original plot, they were also reducing Stitch to being a cutesy mascot. I don't know if that's the case. I guess I will find out in its own time.
My thoughts (so far) on the Lilo & Stitch franchise
Alright, focus here, Élanor, this is the media commentary blog, not the childhood nostalgia blog.
Nah, actually I'm glad I wrote all that. It's why I made a blog, jeez, if I don't allow myself to speak my heart out here, where would I even?
So, getting into actual commentary now, and all the reasons I love the Stitch movies (and the first 6 show episodes I have watched so far). There are many, many reasons; probably the first of those being, admittedly, the art direction and design. I mean, there's no question that Stitch's design is absolutely masterful: the huge head and eyes and cute rabbit-like ears and pudgy-looking limbs, paired with those giant claws and enormous jaw and teeth that clamp shut like a freaking industrial press, heightened by the fact that he's so small and yet he's constantly shown effortlessly carrying around entire spaceships with one hand. Not to mention the way he's animated. I am a huge fan of his bug-like skittering crawl, and the way he squints and hisses at unknown stuff, and I also love when he's shown getting tossed around and slammed on hard surfaces and squished, and he just bounces back like it's nothing to him. This is honestly my favorite brand of indestructible, none of that "hard as a rock" nonsense, just be extremely squishable. Everything in general in this franchise has a particularly soft, round and squishy look. Even the violence (which the color artists do an ESSENTIAL job in highlighting) still looks incredibly pleasing to the eyes, with plasma blasts looking more like gooey substance than actual gunfire.
I have found that I am especially appreciative of design work now that I am designing characters and worlds myself. One of the things I am currently going insane about while watching the show is the designs for the other genetic experiments. They all look really really different, and are each extremely recognizable, and they each have specific features, some very original, some silly, that are telling of their particular destructive powers. Many of them are, in terms of abilities, really, really different from Stitch. And in spite of this, when you look at them you can immediately tell these are not just any aliens- They're Stitch's family. Certain features of their designs can still be traced back to Stitch, they look Stitch-like. You can definitely tell that even though their genetic makeup is probably completely different, they were all still designer creatures made by the same artist. In his own way, it's like Jumba has a particular artstyle for designing his children, which is a charming little thought. Man, I love Jumba. I don't think I loved Jumba this much before my rewatch, but he's just SUCH a fun character. And so BIG. I absolutely adore the "bigness" that the character designs have. Even the tiny characters have this compact, pudgy look, and when you look at the human designs, you can actually see a lot of varying body types- Soft, round and big actually being the most common features of the supporting/background characters instead of magazine-thin. I think Pleakley is the only thin-looking character and he's literally an alien noodle. I mean, don't get me wrong, it's not like I think Nani is overweight (she's kinda like my mom was when she was that age: thin waist from heavy dieting, big thighs because of her genetics), but my point is, you can actually feel the weight and power of her legs when she's surfing or chasing Lilo around.
I think that just by my saying that Aloha, E Komo Mai has been going around and around in my head like an earworm for the past week, you can tell what my thoughts on the soundtrack are. One word: bangers.
When it comes to the writing, both Lilo & Stitch and its sequel, Lilo & Stitch 2: Stitch Has a Glitch (as a fun curiosity, this one was called El Efecto del Defecto, The Effect of the Defect, in eurospanish, and I'm so glad they kept the rhyme), are both really solidly written stories. I watched the sequel just the other day, and while I did remember the plot, there were many things about its execution that I didn't really remember that well, and I'd like to say it surprised and touched me all over again. I really love that Lilo gets the character focus with such a beautiful arc, which does indeed feel like a step further/deeper along the path the first movie set her on: learning to take care of someone else.
In the first movie, Stitch's arrival was good for her because it gave her responsibility, a bit of a taste of her own medicine in paralelling the turbulent relationship she already had with her big sister, and a sense of what it really means to sacrifice oneself for one's family, as well as helping her process grief. The first movie, though, is much more Stitch's (and Nani's) story and arc than it is Lilo's, and I think it was a really smart decision on the writers' part to switch almost completely to her for the next installment. The movies really do feel complimentary to me, like two sides of the thematic coin of their friendship. In the first movie, we see how Stitch slowly lets go of his preconceived destructive purpose, gets to the core of why he does it (because beyond this monstrous purpose, he's got no identity and belongs nowhere), and finally makes the conscious choice to forge a new identity and purpose for himself. He allows himself to have a loving family. In the sequel, Lilo is forced to take her love for Stitch one step further. She has to face her best friend at his destructive worst, AFTER he's been assumed to have turned over a new leaf altogether, AND after repeatedly ruining the single most important thing to Lilo at that moment without any kind of plausible explanation for it. I mean, honestly, if I was going through a similar experience with my best friend, I would be distraught. The effort in forgiveness that Lilo is doing in this movie is just monumental, and it just tore my heart open watching it now.
It's torturous (and I mean that in the best way, storytelling-wise) watching Stitch's glitches (which are actually genuinely terrifying, and look honestly painful), knowing they are totally not the poor guy's fault, and yet neither Lilo nor him are aware of this. Lilo is too hyperfocused on her hula to really notice her friend's pain, and Stitch doesn't have the words to explain it to her, because he has no idea why this is happening either (and already has so much baggage of insecurity regarding that very same thing). The scene where we watch Stitch making so much effort to try and "prove" he's good again, and then giving Lilo this sorrowful, heartfelt apology, only to suffer one of his seizures IMMEDIATELY after and wreck everything, feels SO incredibly raw watching it now. When Lilo admits at the end, faced with the reality of having lost her friend, that she was too focused on herself to notice that Stitch needed her, it really really tugged at my heartstrings. Not to mention the way they tied their friendship to characters in Hawaiian legend, using it to foreshadow the miraculous way Stitch would spark back to life... I love seeing subtle glimpses of divine action in media like that. One thing I really loved about the show, right off the bat, is that they actually wrote a follow-up to Lilo's arc where a loose cousin tries to frame Stitch for his mischief, and this time Lilo's trust in Stitch does NOT WAVER. If Stitch says he didn't do it, then he DIDN'T do it. When the evidence seems to point to Stitch so clearly, she isn't angry, but concerned for her friend instead.
Which brings me to talk about another main reason why I can feel myself falling in love with this franchise all over again. Lilo & Stitch as a franchise is, in essence, an exercise in understanding (and learning to work with) the misunderstood, and often the ugly and the dangerous, and making a conscious, valiant, heroic effort to love all of that anyway. I often can't help but see my own disability in narratives like these, though I'm sure everyone will have their own issues they can identify with here. Mental health is not a joke, it's not something you can solve all at once by believing in yourself very hard. It's a constant battle, and it often causes so much pain, both for others and for oneself. People can behave in strange, destructive ways for all sorts of reasons: be that genetic or instinctual (like Stitch and his cousins), because of cultural differences (like Pleakley), to get attention/love (like Jumba), because they're very stressed and doing too much (like Nani), because they're lonely and grieving (like Lilo), because they grew up in a priviledged environment (like Mertle), because they're just trying to do their job/survive (like Gantu), because they feel it's the right thing to do (like Cobra Bubbles or the Grand Councilwoman), or for all sorts of different reasons. In a way, every character featured in this franchise is a little freak. Every character either is an alien, or has lived their life feeling alien. And the story is taking these characters and saying "we understand your struggle, and we love you all the more for it".
We live in such a cynical era. To me, it often feels like whenever some new piece of media comes up, everyone is rushing over to be the first to nitpick it, make fun of it, or come up with all the reasons it's bad art, or degenerate, or problematic. Actually, the reason I am convinced Lilo & Stitch would not be well received if it came out today, is because Elio (which has a similar kind of premise and message, albeit executed differently) came out this year and was mostly ignored or side-eyed if acknowledged. This cynicism also applies to people, which is why we need more "alien found family movies" like these; "self care" is used as a cheap excuse to be mean to others, to distance oneself from others, as if people could be discarded, as if "badness" was contagious and could hurt you if you look at it. In reality, there is absolutely no "pure" way to interact with the world. The world is darkness, and want it or not, you are part of it. We only get better when we choose to be selfless, even when it's hard.
Regarding the franchise's representation of Hawaii, I have read people praising the way they feature it, in its gentrified reality and portrayal of the culture. I cannot really comment on this; I haven't been to Hawaii, know very little about it, and grew up in a small rural town in what's coloquially known as "the empty/emptied Spain", so I haven't really had much experience regarding gentrification or living alongside tourism either. I will mention, though, that Mertle's embarrassing "advertisement hula" in Stitch 2, with the little american flag in her hair and everything, made me audibly snort. Priceless. Also, in just the little bit of show I have watched + the movies, I have seen both Pleakley and David cosplay as spanish matadores, AND Pleakley fully characterized and beautifully animated as a flamenco dancer. I understand that these are stereotypical "funny" costumes, but as a spanish person... Yes. More please.
I might make new posts as I continue watching the series. If you got this far, thank you so much for reading, really. I appreciate you.
