Lilo & Stitch.

Okay, I did not want to write about Lilo & Stitch. I didn’t even want to see Lilo & Stitch because I don’t believe in remaking a movie that was already good the first time. It was already good the first time! Why do we need to see it again? 

So I didn’t want to write about it, and I didn’t want to see it, but my boyfriend loves AMC movie theaters, and we’re both AMC A-Listers, which means we pay a monthly fee to see as many movies as we want, and this was what was playing, and he wanted to see it, so I went. 

And okay, maybe, I cried the whole time? Not because of Stitch, who is not as cute as he was back in the day and is three-dimensional in a way that makes me uneasy, but because of Lilo and her sister and how in the trash fire that is 2025, there is a movie with what seems like reasonably thoughtful—maybe even beautiful—POC representation.

This movie was chill in a way that I wasn’t expecting, and it presented to us (for the second time, but the first time I was like 7, so I didn’t really get it) the question of what do you do when you’re supposed to care for your kid sister but you’re still kind of a kid yourself? 

Lilo’s teenage sister Nani is trying to take care of her but Lilo is kind of hard to take care of, and Nani’s just trying to make ends meet, but then they adopt Stitch, and Lilo plus Stitch wreak havoc on everything they touch, and seriously how do you take care of your kid sister when you’re still a kid yourself? 

I actually could not stop crying, and my boyfriend, who realized pretty quickly that this movie wasn’t going to hold up to the nostalgia he felt toward the original, kept turning to check that, yes, I was still at it. 

“It’s so beautiful!” I whispered. “She’s such a good sister!”

I was not as chaotic, maybe, as Lilo when I was a kid, but I do have a big sister that did a lot of the grunt work of raising me alongside my mom. Watching Lilo & Stitch now that I’m older, I thought about how much responsibility it is to be there for someone that you didn’t, like, choose to have in your life, but that you still love, despite the inconvenience of them being there, needing you. 

I needed my sister, and Lilo needed hers, and even though the movie dealt with heavy topics like the foster system and the death of one’s parents, it was somehow infused with humor and with joy and with community in a way that felt neither heavy-handed nor careless. I don’t know, for Disney, that felt impressive: this remake, when it came to the sister storyline, felt real in a way that I wasn’t expecting. 

Also, Maia Kealoha, who plays Lilo, is actually a full-on movie star? She still had her baby teeth in the movie and yet was acting in a way that some people work their whole lives to get to. I feel like she was better than the original Lilo, even though the original Lilo was an animation? I don’t even know how that’s possible, but I hope we see more of her. 

There was also Stitch and all of the alien hubbub which, you know, was fun and to be expected, but it was the sister storyline that had me glad I saw the movie after all. I moaned and groaned about going to watch it, I did not want to write about it, I already knew the story, but there I was crying still. The world is very shaky right now, and it is as always hard to trust anything coming from an enormous corporation and yet, there is still something good about this movie. Sisters! Trying to figure it out like the rest of us! And with a community that buoys them through.

Image: Disney