Lilo & Stitch (2025) - Review 

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

DISNEY’S decision to remake its animated classics as live-action movies may have drawn critical derision but it’s also proving to be box office gold.

Following in the footsteps of past classics such as The Lion King, The Jungle Book and Beauty & The Beast, Lilo & Stitch revisits the popular 2002 animation about a young girl and her home-wrecking but lovable alien friend with a little help from director Dean Fleischer Camp (Marcel the Shell with Shoes On) and writers Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois (the duo behind How To Train Your Dragon).

The results are mixed. The film lacks any of the originality that made any of this team’s past work so memorable, yet it plays well to its target audience (young kids) and has a fair amount of heart to offset its mayhem. Parents may find it something of a struggle though.

The story follows Stitch (still voiced by the character’s co-creator, Sanders) as he escapes from his home planet (where he is known as Experiment 626) to Earth, where he crash lands into the troubled lives of Lilo (Maia Kealoha), a six-year-old Hawaiian girl living with her older sister Nani (Sydney Elizebeth Agudong), following the deaths of both of their parents.

Stitch must keep one step ahead of his creator, an alien mad scientist named Jumba (Zach Galifianakis), who has arrived with a supervisory colleague (Billy Magnussen) to recapture him, while Lilo and Nani are trying to earn the right to stay together by proving to a social worker (Tia Carrere) and a CIA agent (Courtney B Vance) that they can behave responsibly.

The outcome is never less than predictable, with no contrivance left unvisited. There are inevitable fallouts and reconciliations, love interests waiting to be claimed, life lessons being learned and even the odd near death experience to bring characters closer.

All of which leaves Lilo & Stitch to be judged on how well it covers the terrain.

If you’re young and have a fondness for the Stitch character then, to be fair, he does come across as suitably cute, while his pratfalls and mischievous nature are sure to generate the required laughs. There’s nothing original in them - from inadvertent environment wrecking to bodily fluid gags - but they got the right response at the screening we were in.

The performers, meanwhile, seem to have the measure of the material without hitting any dud notes. Kealoha is also cute and just the right side of precocious, while her older sister Agudong carries the bulk of the emotional heavy-lifting with relative charm.

Galifianakis and Magnussen are suitably juvenile and goofy in their villainous roles, while the likes of Vance and Amy Hill (as a kindly neighbour) bring consummate professionalism to their straight-forward roles.

It’s all done to achieve the maximum appeal to its target audience with the minimum amount of effort. And given Disney’s experience, it’s a well oiled machine that sticks rigidly to formula.

Its runaway box office success proves that if it ain’t broke, then there’s absolutely no need to fix it.

But older, wiser audiences (aka accompanying adults) may well lament the lack of anything daring or genuinely to really challenge. For even the emotional beats - which are nicely played - feel par for the course and don’t come with any real edge.

If anything, the beats gloss over some of the more weighty material (grief, loss, poverty, feeling like an outsider) that better Disney offshoots (such as Pixar) handle with so much more finesse (showing what can be done within the medium).

Here, they feel a little tokenistic and borderline manipulative.

The overall result is a crowd pleaser that hits by virtue of knowing what succeeds in a commercial sense (as evidenced by its colossal box office success). But in terms of creativity and innovation (the watch words that enabled Disney to get where it is in the first place), it’s largely bankrupt.

Certificate: U

Running time: 108mins