When director Chris Sanders started working “Lilo & Stitch” Movie visual development supervisor Sue Nichols made a surprising comparison.
“She drew Moulin side by side next to Nani,” Sanders said, referring to Lilo’s sister. “And looking at the height of her torso, she pointed out that Moulin actually lacks some of her anatomy.”
Sanders, who wrote and directed “Lilo & Stitch” with Dean DeBlois, chose a more complete animation style for the film. This is a comedy adventure that has been praised by critics and fans for its realistic body shape, cultural accuracy, and misunderstood protagonist. It has been 20 years since it was released on June 21, 2002.
The movie tells the story of a young Hawaiian girl named Lilo whose life was upset when Stitch, an alien fugitive, crashed nearby. The film laid the foundation for recent Disney movie trends, including a lack of major love stories and a more modest protagonist.
“When we turned the clock in the 1990s and 2000s, everyone thought the world would end,” he said. Cialon Roberts, Editor of the book “Recreating the Disney Princess in the Age of New Media and Social Movements” and an associate professor of mass communication at Xavier University in New Orleans. “Therefore, all the content they created was this unknown quest, not the fairy tales we saw in the 80’s and 90’s.”
Sanders initially thought of this story as a children’s book, but recreated the pitch for the big screen. It was a weak person from the beginning.
After a series of high-profile but expensive 1990s releases that cost more than $ 120 million, like “Atlantis” and “Tarzan,” producers of “Lilo” are more than $ 80 million. I aimed to make a small movie. De Blois and Sanders, who worked together in the story department at Mulan in 1998, reunited for co-director and co-writing. Already a veteran actress, preteen Daveigh Chase called out to Lilo. But in the case of stitches, they went with Sanders.
“We didn’t want to go to a real actor like Danny DeVito, so we told the studio,” Why did you hire someone who is a known entity, but they only say 15 words. ” “He said,” Sanders said.
“I love that it’s the way he remembers it,” he said. Clark SpencerProduced the film and is currently the president of Walt Disney Animation Studios. “But this was Chris’s character on the first day. He did the design. He knew what he wanted to be a character and how his voice would sound. Chris Stitch’s voice I can’t imagine anything else. “
Initially, the story was planned to take place in the countryside of Kansas, but after a vacation on the island, Sanders decided to show the film on another remote island, Kauai, Hawaii.
He, DeBlois, and other members of the creative team made another trip to Kauai. This time, we talked with the locals and became familiar with Hawaiian culture.
“One of the things I learned from making Mulan is that if you set the story in a particular place in the real world, there are places you can’t go,” says De Blois. “Because you are an outsider, there are some cultural elements that you cannot use.”
So they hired a Hawaiian musician Mark Keali’i Hoomaru Talking about hula and choral arrangements, a Hawaiian cast member (Tia Carrere who spoke Nani and Jason Scott Lee who played her boyfriend) edited to better reflect the Kauai dialect. Proposed.
Roberts, a scholar at Xavier University, said the beginning was a more realistic portrayal of Hawaii, but the production did not take the steps that “Moana” would hire a Hawaiian writing and supervision team.
“Disney really had a hard time telling the story of the Asia Pacific,” she said. “That’s why I spent a lot of time putting Brain Trust around the much more popular movie Moana, from casting to making sure that certain parts of the story arc didn’t touch the stereotypes. .. Therefore, there are a few more lessons about bringing people to the table to support the writing team. “
“Lilo & Stitch” touched on real-life issues that could involve a young audience. Nani is forced to become Lilo’s legal guardian after her parents died in a car accident and faces the struggle to raise her child. And it seems that social workers are always catching Nani and Lilo in the worst possible condition.
Still, the filmmaker received negative feedback on the initial screening, Sanders said: viewers mistakenly believed that Nani was Lilo’s mother, so Nani was Lilo in the scene. I didn’t like to grab it with my wrist.
The filmmaker revealed it with Howard Ashman’s trick. “He said,’If you want the audience to remember something, he has to say it three times in a row,'” Spencer said. “So I started the scene over,” he says, referring to Lilo and Nani being sisters three times in a row.
But the team didn’t edit the movie in response to another complaint, Spencer said: the audience didn’t like how much Nani and Lilo yelled at each other.
“Chris, Dean and I would say,’But that’s true,'” Spencer said. “This is the moment when Nani feels pressure, and Lilo feels out of place with her and tries to understand who she is.”
Filmmakers also prioritized realism in other areas. A more realistic depiction of the female body. Lilo is short and chubby, Nani has thick thighs, and Sanders calls it the “real pelvis.”
The movie, scholar Roberts, said the movie was very different from the typical Disney fare. “Ten years ago, the princess had fully developed the body of an adult woman,” she said. “But we allow Lilo to still be like a child. Her face is so innocent. We have a body that is not size 0 — we are perfect in our dimensions Has a girlhood embodied in. “
Lilo is also personally allowed to be a child. “One of the metaphors in these films is that children are always smarter, better, and better tuned than adults, who are always played as Bahoon,” Sanders said. “But we didn’t do that. Lilo bites a little girl, she has a seizure, she just says meaningless. She behaves like a real kid.”
According to Roberts, Lilo was the lead in a rare female Disney animation with no love interest (unless you count her passion for Elvis). By choosing to focus on the sisterhood of Lilo and Nani instead, the studio finally achieved a reversal of the archetype that was established dating back to “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” she added. rice field.
Disney “slowly picked up the message” Someday My Prince Will Come “in the 90’s,” she said, proving early films such as “Beauty and the Beast,” “Aladdin,” and “Mulan.” He added. A movie with a female lead as strong as her male love interest can make money. “So Lilo takes that step forward by eliminating the interest of men’s love.”
Janet WascoThe author of “Understanding Disney: The Manufacturing of Fantasy” focuses on the lead of women who have no romance or plans to marry, and “Lilo & Stitch” is Moana, Merida of “Brave”, “Turn Over”.
“Lilo & Stitch” is Tom Cruise’s sci-fi thriller “Minority Report” Ultimately earn $ 273 million Globally. (Also nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature Film, but lost to Hayao Miyazaki’s “Spirited Away”.) “Lilo” has three direct video series, three television series, and many. Created a franchise that includes a television series. Theme park rides. There is also a live-action remake under development.
“This is one of the movies that people say’what they worked on’. When you say’Lilo & Stitch’, you literally feel a change,” Spencer said.
Fans, despite Lilo’s frustration for feeling misunderstood, even the rebellious nature of Stitch, a world that constantly interferes with her good intentions, to Nani’s determination, how they do. I repeatedly told him if I could be involved.
“When the movie was released, it was what many critics were talking about,” he said. “These moments that were based on reality in a way that people could see themselves, and it didn’t feel like they were cartoon characters.”
Sanders wants more people to notice how the relationship between the two sisters predicts a “freeze” for more than a decade.
“For clarity, I think’Frozen’is great,” he said. “But I was a little frustrated because there was someone like’Finally a non-romantic relationship with these two girls’.’Yeah! It’s definitely been done before.'”
