The Live-Action “Lilo & Stitch” Director Explained One Of The Film’s Most Dramatic Changes, But I’m Still Bummed
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Warning: Major spoilers ahead.
There’s a significant change in Disney’s live-action Lilo & Stitch that some people might have difficulty coming to terms with, and I get it.
Of course, there’s Stitch.
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Pleakley and Jumba are present.
There’s even the Grand Councilwoman!
In the live-action Lilo & Stitch, the main antagonist is no longer Captain Gantu, but instead Jumba (Zach Galifianakis), hellbent on capturing his rogue experiment for his evil galactic domination plot.
Remember when Captain Gantu captured Lilo and Stitch, and instead of letting Gantu die after he rescued Lilo, Stitch saved Gantu, too, and we all started crying? Yeah, that’s not happening in this version.
Director Dean Fleischer Camp explained to Entertainment Weekly why they made this big change from the original movie. “Something that live-action films do by virtue of taking place in reality is that they are already more grounded,” Dean said to the publication. “If you have a story like Lilo & Stitch that does actually have this pretty terrestrial drama between the sisters and staying together, you can actually do them a greater service in a live-action movie. You can make those relationships deeper, hopefully more emotionally resonant.”
We’ve seen these types of changes before in Disney live-action remakes. Remember when Mushu and Cri-Kee were completely missing from the live-action Mulan?
In addition to Gantu’s omission, there was a big change with Cobra Bubbles being a very intimidating social worker and an obvious homage to Ving Rhames’s Pulp Fiction character, Marsellus Wallace.
“You end up thinking about how it is a very different experience to see an actual 6-year-old girl potentially being threatened with being torn from her caregiver sister after grieving the loss of their parents,” Dean said. “That is a very different kind of responsibility from a filmmaking perspective than what you can get away with in an animated film.”
In the new film, Cobra Bubbles is just a CIA agent, and his role as Lilo’s social worker was given to the new character Mrs. Kekoa (played by Tia Carrere, the voice of Nani from the animated film).
“If the dramatic stakes of Lilo is that she’s going to get separated from her sister, then you need a person who actually services those stakes in a credible way,” Dean continued. “You can get away with that being Cobra Bubbles in an animated film — a 6-foot-5 huge dude with ‘Cobra’ tattooed on his knuckles is somehow a social worker in that world.”
Big, tall, scary dudes like Gantu and animated Bubbles are apparently “too much live-action.”
