Lilo & Stitch (live action)

In Disney’s 2025 live-action Lilo & Stitch, Lilo Pelekai, a young Hawaiian girl, lives with her older sister Nani after their parents’ deaths. Struggling with loneliness, Lilo adopts a strange “dog” named Stitch, unaware he is Experiment 626, a fugitive alien created by Dr. Jumba Jookiba for destruction. As Stitch causes chaos in Hawaii while evading capture by Jumba and Pleakley, he bonds with Lilo, learning about love and family.

Lilo & Stitch (live action) Review

Mostly sticking to the original’s story with minor changes, as Disney live action remakes go, there are much much worse than Lilo & Stitch. Unfortunately, every change that they did make only served to leech the soul out of the story, relegating this to some relatively safe summer fluff.

                   

Zach Galifianakis and Bill Magnussen are pale reflections of the original Jumba and Pleakley, offering a few moments of weak and perfunctory slapstick that do little to enrich the film. Agent Bubbles, played by Courtney B. Vance, lacks Ving Rhames’ gravitas and presence, though that’s not as much his fault as that of the script, which gives him very little to do since his role has been split into two to make room for Tia Carrere. Carrere, who voiced Nani in the original, now plays the social worker bent on taking Lilo away from her sister. She’s fine in the movie, but lacks the dynamics of Rhames’ Bubbles and is rather generic– eating up time better spent on character development.

This version spends a lot more time focused on the relationship between the titular characters, which is fine, but repeated lessons in “being good” get fairly repetitive pretty quickly. Without much time given for the rest of the cast to develop their subplots, the story, which is over twenty minutes longer than the animated version, feels less. However, this version benefits from one of the cutest leading actresses since Shirley Temple.

Maia Kealoha, who plays Lilo, is an absolute delight whose bubbly effervescence and shocking commitment (for someone so young) to the film’s reality carry the movie on her tiny shoulders despite its otherwise direct-to-video quality.

Were it not for a major change in the final act (see the WOKE REPORT below), we’d comfortably recommend Lilo & Stitch as a tolerable family diversion that the kids will like and adults will occasionally chuckle at, but The Woke Mind Virus got ahold of the script leaving us no choice but to caution parents that they may need to at least talk to their kids afterwards to set them straight on what’s truly important in life.

PARENTAL NOTES

How Hard Is It To Not Say It

• “Oh my God” is said at least once. It may have been said one other time, but it was too hard to hear to be sure.

WOKE REPORT

DISCLAIMER:

• Let me preface this by saying that I found the following so egregious that I seriously considered marking the whole film as “woke” rather than “woke-ish,” even though it constitutes only three to five minutes of the film and is McGuffined into a marginally neutral conclusion.

Me Me Me

• It feels like a raging feminist got hold of the final pages of the script and stripped the remake of the original’s emotional heart. In the animated Lilo & Stitch, Lilo’s sister wasn’t just a caretaker by default—she chose to become a mother to her little sister, driven by love, not guilt. Her arc wasn’t about career ambition—it was about embracing motherhood and building a home. The romantic subplot with David wasn’t just incidental; it was meaningful. It showed that she needed a man—not to save her, but to stand beside her. And there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s a beautiful thing for a woman to need a man, and for a man to be needed in return. But the remake sidesteps this entirely, replacing it with the modern notion that fulfillment comes not from love or family, but from independence, education, and career success.
  • The live-action version tries to mimic the original’s emotional core and even has a couple of touching moments. Early on, Lilo tells her sister she prefers her as a sister, not a mom. Later, after enduring more together, she admits she now loves her as both. It should be powerful.
  • But the film undercuts this with clunky insertions about the sister’s past—she’s repeatedly described as a gifted athlete and super-academic with a full ride to UCLA, forced to give it all up to raise Lilo. These details feel less like character development and more like setup for the ending.
  • And that’s where the film falls off the cliff. Instead of proving to child services that she’s a capable mother,
    Spoiler

    the sister ultimately gives Lilo up—yes, gives her away—to an elderly neighbor and her grandson (David the erstwhile love interest) so she can finally “take care of herself” and move across the ocean to chase her career dreams.
    The message? That family is interchangeable, you don’t need no man, and motherhood is less important than punching a clock and a healthy 401k.
  • It’s a baffling rewrite that downplays the original’s celebration of family and maternal love—and replaces it with hollow progressivism.

Right vs Left

• In the original, Bubbles wore a large golden earring in both ears to emulate Ving Rhames’ aesthetic. In this, the character wears only one, and it’s in the right ear. There’s no other indication that the character might be gay but costumes don’t happen by accident. I didn’t mark the Woke-O-Meter down much for this because it’s inconclusive, but it’s also Disney, and they don’t deserve the benefit of the doubt.