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Credit: DisneyAfter months of waiting, watching, and seeing Stitch cause chaos in hilarious promotions, Disney’s newest live-action remake, Lilo & Stitch. Based on the 2002 animated film, Lilo & Stitch tells the story of a young Hawaiian girl named Lilo who adopts what she believes is a dog, but is actually Stitch—a genetically-engineered alien fugitive.
As Lilo struggles with loneliness and the challenges of family life with her older sister Nani, Stitch learns about love, belonging, and ‘Ohana (family), ultimately transforming from a destructive creature into a caring friend.
Related: VIDEO: Stitch Wreaks Havoc as Disney Promotes Newest Live-Action
No live-action remake is exactly the same as its animated counterpart, and Lilo & Stitch did face some backlash before its release. Early on, fans learned that Pleakley would not have his moment where he dressed like a woman in an attempt to blend in with humans.
Director Dean Fleischer Camp explained that he tried to make the moment work — and even showed some storyboard art — but that, in the end, it just couldn’t come together.
Lilo & Stitch premiered in theaters on May 23, but just days before that, it was revealed that Captain Gantu — the animated film’s main protagonist — was also NOT appearing in the live-action remake.
Fans were incredibly upset to learn that Disney had made such a massive change to the story, and they flooded social media, demanding answers.
Now that the film is finally here, the film’s director is finally explaining why such a drastic change was made.
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Fleischer Camp said that Gantu had to be removed in order to ” maintain the more realistic parameters.”
“Something that live-action films do by virtue of taking place in reality is that they are already more grounded,” Fleischer Camp tells Entertainment Weekly. “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.”
“To create real estate for all that emotional stuff and the deepening that we did, you have to get rid of stuff. And so Gantu was a casualty of that, but one that I felt pretty confident about from a storytelling perspective.”
Related: As ‘Lilo & Stitch’ Takes Over Memorial Day Weekend, Disney Considers a Sequel
He also said that because the film is live-action, the connection to the characters can run deeper, and the stakes appear much higher. So, seeing a large creature try to steal a young girl from her family will feel different from how it does in an animated film.
There’s also the fact that live action can heighten or change the stakes of storytelling, which was a factor here. “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,” Fleischer Camp says. “That is a very different kind of responsibility from a filmmaking perspective than what you can get away with in an animated film.”
The decision to cut Captain Gantu also led to the creation of a brand-new character, Ms. Kekoa, Lilo’s social worker, who is played by Tia Carrere, the voice of Nani in the original animated movie. Fleischer Camp and his team felt that it wasn’t realistic for Cobra Bubbles to be a social worker, so they brought in Ms. Kekoa and turned Bubbles into a CIA agent.
Despite the changes made in the live-action remake and the initial backlash, fans have not stopped heading to the theaters over the Memorial Day holiday weekend. The remake is expected to bring in almost $200 million over the long weekend, which is impressive, considering Memorial Day Weekend has been a theatrical dead zone in the past.
Do you think it was a good idea to cut Captain Gantu from the Lilo & Stitch live-action remake? Can you see why the director did what he did? Will you be seeing Lilo & Stitch in theaters, or will you wait for it to hit Disney+? Let us know your thoughts in the comments!