What We're Watching: Lilo and Stitch

"Lilo and Stitch" 2002/Rated PG. We actually just deleted this one from our DVR to make room for Tarzan. (Review of that one coming soon.) Whenever we record a new movie, we ask Peanut to chose one to delete. After all, mommy and daddy need DVR space for HGTV shows and the final season of Weeds. (Who am I kidding? We have more Doc McStuffins on there than anything else.) When she chose this movie to get rid of, I was ecstatic. I didn't really care for Lilo and Stitch. Why? Let's face it. Stitch is a d!ck. He's someone else's misbehaved child that you  so badly want to discipline but can't.

Even Disney itself played up Stitch as an unlikeable bad-boy renegade in its genius promotional campaign for the movie. (Click here to see it if the video below doesn't work.)


Sure, Stitch appears to be as cuddly as a koala. And as I've mentioned before, I love koalas. Then again koalas aren't really all that cuddly. They're kind of a d!ck too:

 :

Maybe I'm being too hard on Stitch, and this movie. It does have great music, most of it from Elvis. So that's a huge plus. And its overriding message is the importance of family, as Stitch tries to become part of Lilo's. While I'm not generally against showing Peanut movies with misbehaved characters, there are a lot of negatives in this one if you ask me. First, Disney tried too hard to make this movie appeal to boys and girls. It has alien fight scenes followed by dancing hula girls. And it just doesn't work. There's also a lot of violence, a couple of dead parents that never are really adequately explained, a main character who is also a misfit (Lilo) for reasons too complicated to explain to a five-year old, and a child services worker voiced by Ving Rhames who spends the whole movie trying to take Lilo away from her sister. (Her sister, also, can't seem to be able to hold down a job because Stitch keeps destroying things at her places of work.)

"No, Lilo. Your living situation is pretty f*cking far from ok."

No amount of Elvis songs could make me like this mess of a movie. When Disney marketed Stitch as a d!ck, that should have been a signal to the rest of us to stay away. And to top things off, I am incapable of correctly pronouncing "Lilo." Peanut has to correct me every time:

"Daddy, it's LEE-lo. Not LIE-lo."

Thankfully I won't be making that mistake as much anymore. This clunker no longer occupies precious hard-drive space on the DVR.

I was much more enthusiastic in my review of "Brave." Click here to read it.