Lilo & Stitch: A Movie

This weekend, I saw Lilo & Stitch in 3D. Yes, 3D! I wore my special glasses and saw the objects actually coming towards me. I was taken to Oahu, Hawaii where I met Lilo (Maia Kealoha) and her older sister Nani (Sydney Agudong).

They had recently lost their parents and Nani is trying to be both the older sister and mother to young Lilo. But she has her own troubles with a beat-up car and waitress jobs that come and go. She tries to hold it all together while social services monitor her failing parenting skills and threaten to take Lilo away from her.

Lilo, in the meantime, continually gets into trouble and ‘acts out’ because she is lonely and feels misunderstood. She prays in the privacy of her room for the angels to send her someone that understands her. Enter Stitch (Chris Sanders’ voice), a blue extraterrestrial that has escaped from his planet. He lands in the dog pound, though he is not a dog. He talks!

He is an experiment and he has a host of aliens in hot pursuit who plan to recapture him and take him back. He and Lilo meet at the dog pound where she regularly visits and they immediately bond. They have one thing in common – being mischievous.

Thus, the adventures begin. As they fall into a series of mishaps, Bruno Mars’ Uptown Funk plays in the background along with other Hawaiian musicians, as they run and play along the landscape. We (the audience) see Hawaii’s tourist strip, its beautiful beaches and cliff-top views, but we also see the terrain of the everyday people off the beaten paths. We have a window into how the regular working people live as we enter Nani and Lilo’s home. It exudes familial warmth and at night, the porch is surrounded by soft lights.

Also, during the movie, there is a lot of Elvis music. Hawaiians have never forgotten Elvis’ 1973 Honolulu concert which was played by satellite around the world. Nor have they forgotten his movie, Blue Hawaii which was partially filmed in Oahu in 1961.

We see Lilo consoling herself before Stitch’s arrival by playing her mother’s Elvis vinyl records in her room. We hear Heartbreak Hotel, Hound Dog, Stuck on You and Suspicious Minds, along with other titles. At the end, Stitch even dresses up as Elvis in full costume with a guitar. Hilarious.

It was a fun movie though some of the extraterrestrials were a tad scary. But maybe we look scary to them. Who knows?

Lynn M.
June 1, 2025