Disney’s live-action version of Lilo & Stitch made quite the splash when it debuted to the biggest Memorial Day opening weekend ever. But the film remake of the 2002 animated original about a Hawaiian girl and her frisky alien friend also spurred extensive debate surrounding changes to the narrative, particularly its ending.
One recent viral post on X (formerly Twitter) noted that a scene in the first movie in which Nani and Lilo bond over the Hawaiian concept of “ohana” is changed in the new one. This led another user to post that it is “not crazy to say this movie is pro-colonize Hawaii propaganda.” (Spoilers are ahead.) The follow-up comment, which has received more than 200,000 likes, spurred debate over the new version’s ending, in which Nani (played by Sydney Elizebeth Agudong) moves to California for college and agrees to give up younger sister Lilo (Maia Kealoha) to the state, with the girl being raised by a neighbor. In the original film, Nani remained Lilo’s legal guardian.
“The original movie was so much about being against the carceral system in terms of foster care, Stitch’s imprisonment and the colonial system as a whole in Hawaii,” author Mariah Rigg, who was born and raised on Oahu, tells The Hollywood Reporter. “I was fully surprised at the remake’s ending, in terms of Nani leaving the state altogether, because I feel like that really contributes to the narrative of displacement of Hawaiians from their ancestral lands. Obviously, there is all this discourse on how ‘ohana means family’ is not really represented in that ending, but in an even larger way, it’s harmful on how it contributes to that narrative of the displacement of Hawaiians from Hawaiian lands.”
Director Dean Fleischer Camp’s live-action Lilo & Stitch tapped into an unexpected fan base, collecting more money at the global box office in its opening four-day weekend than the first feature did in its entire run. Critics were generally impressed, as the new film holds a 69 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with THR’s own review calling it “faithful enough to the original to please traditionalists and tweaked enough to feel somewhat fresh.” Prior to this month, the Lilo & Stitch property had already become one of Disney’s top 10 best-selling franchises ever, bringing in a reported $2.6 billion in merchandise last year.
Sydney Agudong as Nani, Maia Kealoha as Lilo and Stitch in Lilo & Stitch.
Courtesy of Disney
According to Delia Konzett, a professor at the University of New Hampshire who wrote about the original film in her book Hollywood’s Hawaii, the animated Lilo & Stitch can be commended for putting a Hawaiian family at the center of the story and featuring a Hawaiian love interest for Nani. However, she also notes elements of its narrative that rely on stereotypes, including Elvis Presley as the sound of Hawaii or the CIA agent becoming a friendly representative of the government and thus diminishing the distrust that real-life Hawaiians can be feel toward U.S. authorities’ presence in managing the islands.
“The concept of ‘ohana’ as an extended family embracing the entire community would contradict Nani giving up Lilo to the state, since ‘ohana’ stresses the community’s self-regulation not requiring any government intervention,” Konzett tells THR. She adds, “Unlike mainland audiences, Hawaiian audiences are torn about the commodification of Hawaii in terms of tourism serving as a continuing playground for exoticized Pacific fantasies.”
For his part, Fleischer Camp has said that he felt the original movie made Nani “a little too rose-colored-glasses,” given all that she dealt with at a young age. On Tuesday, the director reposted social media praise from a fan who called the remake’s ending “more realistic” and talked about her own experience as a teen mom. Fleischer Camp added, “It seems like the people with actual lived experiences like this are the ones with whom this ending resonates the most.”
Through the years, Hollywood projects set on Hawaii have been subject to criticism over a lack of local representation, including the use of brownface in the 1970 Charlton Heston movie The Hawaiians and, more recently, the casting of Emma Stone as a character of Chinese and Hawaiian descent in 2015’s Aloha. Although some social media posts criticize actress Agudong as being more light-skinned than Nani was depicted in the animated film, individuals who spoke to THR emphasize that the casting feels reflective of the Hawaiian populace. However, one recent Hawaii-set project that was dinged for featuring white actors in the lead roles was the first season of HBO’s hit series The White Lotus.
“It’s a very colonial telling of Hawaii,” Rigg says of the HBO’s show first season. “The original Lilo & Stitch opens interesting dialogues about how the labor of Hawaiian people is commodified and also limited in terms of the opportunities that Hawaiians employees are allowed, simply due to systemic inequalities and access to education. But it centered those Hawaiian characters. On The White Lotus, everyone who’s Hawaiian is either a peripheral character or erased from the narrative.”
Disney’s presence on Hawaii includes Aulani, a beachside resort that opened in 2011 and includes Stitch as one of the characters making poolside visits to guests. Konzett notes that the hotel provides jobs for Hawaiians but calls it “a part of the ever-expanding tourist entertainment complex that turns the islands into a theme park experience rather than a genuine cultural encounter. I’m sure that Disney’s Lilo & Stitch promotes in concert with the Disney resort the overall Disney franchise, more so than any deep involvement with Hawaii.”
Hawaiian filmmaker James Sereno praises the new Lilo & Stitch for hiring Hawaiian writer Chris Kekaniokalani Bright to work on the script and has heard from locals who enjoy the remake. Sereno feels optimistic about such forthcoming Hawaiian-focused projects as Jason Momoa’s Apple TV+ series Chief of War and 20th Century’s planned crime film from Martin Scorsese and Dwayne Johnson. While acknowledging that there could be complicated feelings about a white director like Scorsese leading the project, Sereno is mostly focused on whether the story will be told in an authentic way.
“That is the hard part — but I think that’s the hard part with anything,” he says about debate over who gets to tell these stories. “So I don’t think that’s exclusive to Hawaii’s stories. With Scorsese, he’s a hero of mine. To see him tell this story from his perspective in that way, it can get to the screen. Do I think that’s super authentic? I don’t know. But you would hope that they mix [in local voices] and that they listen.”
