The 2002 movie Lilo and Stitch is perfect, but remake culture loves to mess with perfection—and so here we are, on the verge of a live-action Disney do-over. But at least there are good signs: The film has Dean Fleischer Camp (Marcel the Shell With Shoes On) as director, and has just found its Lilo in newcomer Maia Kealoha.
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Kealoha doesn’t have any credits yet, and next to nothing is known about her. She joins Zach Galifianakis, whose role in the film is also unknown. The only other detail that is known, in fact, is that the remake’s screenplay is by Chris Kekaniokalani Bright.
As I said, Lilo and Stitch is perfect. It’s a movie about a lonely little girl who is being raised in Hawaii by her harried sister, Nani. When Nani says that Lilo can get a dog, she picks a very strange-looking one—not knowing that her new pet is actually Experiment 626, genetically engineered for destruction by the alien Dr. Jumba Jookiba. But Stitch can be tamed—by the soothing sounds of Elvis Presley, and by the power of family.
The movie was, inexplicably, not a box-office smash, but Disney is clearly aware that everyone who saw it loved it and told fifteen friends about it, and that there is an audience out there who will probably go to the remake, even as we wish Disney would stop regurgitating everything it has ever done.
No release date has been announced.
