Live-Action ‘Lilo & Stitch’ Jettisons Ohana

Disney live-action remakes have long been a topic of exhausted scorn rather than genuine excitement, although the new Lilo & Stitch has proven to be a relatively high-profile case study in terms in how these movies seem determined to undermine nearly everything that gave the originals classic status. For those completely unfamiliar–Lilo & Stitch was, originally, a 2002 Disney flick that was deliberately off-brand, and pretty much the only movie from this specific era of weird Disney that anyone remembers with any fondness. It stars Stitch, a dangerous, mostly nonverbal alien crash landing in Hawaii and becoming ensnared in the troubled home life of Lilo. In the original film, Lilo, Stitch, and Lilo’s older sister Nani become a happy family.

The controversy is that in the new ending…Lilo goes foster care. This sounds like a joke, and indeed, many people didn’t believe the early spoilers, since only reactionary publications like Bounding Into Comics were discussing them at all. But nope, that is indeed exactly what happens in the new movie. This decision doesn’t exist in a vacuum though, unsurprisingly, bringing up the exact context doesn’t really help that much.

In both versions of the movie, there’s a running subplot about the social worker Cobra Bubbles surveying the mayhem caused by Stitch and concluding, not entirely unreasonably based on the information available to him, that Nani is not a trustworthy guardian for her little sister. Cobra Bubbles is a character of contrasts, as his name rather unsubtly implies. He looks terrifying and menacing, yet a genuine desire to do what’s best for Lilo motivates him. Though an antagonistic presence, Cobra Bubbles is not the villain of Lilo & Stitch, the dissonance between the character’s appearance and his motivation being an obvious theme seen elsewhere in the work.

While Lilo & Stitch was far from the first Disney animated feature to spotlight persons of color, it was the first feature to do so in a modern America, rather than a historical foreign context. This created a fairly distinctive subtext. Yes, Cobra Bubbles is scary looking in part because he’s a big black guy. But as a representative of the state, he’s also a stand-in for the rather dark history of child protective services in the United States, which once upon a time, kidnapped native children from their home cultures to civilize them. What makes the Cobra Bubbles scenes so brutal and memorable is that he’s tapping into a very real, very relatable fear.

Lilo & Stitch explores these contradictions in most of its other themes too. Two decades before The White Lotus, this Disney animated feature portrayed a surprisingly class-conscious understanding of Hawaii from the perspective of actual Hawaiians, whose whole economy revolves around servicing alien outsiders. That some of the outsiders in Lilo & Sitch are literally aliens, as opposed to just being clueless rich white people, only makes the metaphor that much stronger. Hawaii may be Lilo and Nani’s home, but they have surprisingly little agency compared to to Disney heroines from considerably less enlightened eras.

What does the remake do with Cobra Bubbles? Well, it switches him into two completely different characters, in the words of director Dean Fleischer Camp, because, in order to buy the separation of these two girls in a live-action movie, you couldn’t really have the representative of that antagonistic force be a comically huge guy with tattoos on his knuckles, who for some reason is also a social worker. It’s a statement that’s almost impressive in its sheer racism and sexism. But I don’t think Camp was even trying to be racist here. He was struggling with a bigger contradiction.

In the heyday of the first Lilo & Stitch, the idea that maybe the government doesn’t always have our best interests at heart was a fairly common bipartisan one. This subversive theming, alongside the fairly strong core family dynamic, allowed Lilo &Stitch to become a genuine hit while the world almost completely forgot other weird Disney movies of this era like Atlantis: The Lost Empire and Treasure Planet. That it could be successful even in the wake of 9/11 was impressive, although not surprising, given the sheer quality of the animation.

But Disney conceived of the Lilo & Stitch remake under very different circumstances. In the current political environment, expressing mistrust of government bureaucracy is now considered a Trumpism. For the audience to even entertain the idea that a social worker is bad news is offensive. Nani’s decision to put Lilo’s needs over her own, or indeed, to consider that ohana  means acclimating to the idea that their emotional connection is what matters the most for both of them, is also dangerously unambitious in a country whose vision of social justice simply means more women obtaining sufficiently prestigious jobs.

Fuck Ohana I guess pic.twitter.com/OT9i4SSJU0

— 🍉LoZza🍉 (@CocoaFox023) May 24, 2025

Indeed, the original movie has hints that Nani is giving up a lot for Lilo, namely a possible career as a professional surfer, going by her display of trophies. This, of course, doesn’t really sound like a good reason to abandon your little sister who has no other family left. Hence why the remake gives Nani an interest in marine biology. Though this interest is more high-culturally minded, and therefore implicitly good for society, unlike professional surfing, it requires that Nani abandon Hawaii entirely for the mainland United States.

Hence the need to put Lilo in foster care. Not to worry though! Through the use of a portal gun, we see that Nani is able to visit Lilo reasonably often. Reading all these events in terms of their ideological sequentialism leads to some fairly absurd ideas- the problem with Native American residential schools wasn’t that they divided families. No, no, the schools themselves were fine, it’s just that crude nineteenth century technology made it impractical for those kids to both get an education and spend time with their families. Maybe we, too, can enjoy such freedoms in the twenty-second century.

But beyond just the political subtext, there’s also the production context. No one knew Lilo & Stitch was going to be a hit when they were making it, so the story had to stand on its own merits. And to be clear, while I’m sure I’m making Lilo & Stitch sound very austere and serious, this is a movie with copious slapstick, some fairly absurd alien designs, and equally absurd disguises. The remake just…doesn’t do any of that. Strangely enough, it appears to crib influence from Disney’s old Alien Encounter experience, of all things. Mainly because Disney reskinned it as being about Stitch at some point, rendering the whole thing less as scary (imagine something terrifying breathing down your neck) versus silly (Stitch making goofy noises nearby). Sucking the heart of something specific to a certain moment and rendering it…generically.

This has pretty much been the Disney live-action adaptation trend writ large really. Although I don’t know that we can really call it a trend, given that nobody asked for this, we’re just stuck with whatever movies the major studios deign to give us at this point. It’s remarkable how even that tagline contains an entirely different set of loaded implications from the original to the remake. In the early aughts, as was the style at the time, Disney was trying to market Lilo & Stitch as being genuinely edgy. Whereas with the remake it feels like they’re just taunting us.