Far off in the galaxy an alien scientist has created the ultimate weapon, Experiment Six Two Six. When this experiment escapes their clutches and lands in Hawaii on the planet Earth, a young native girl named Lilo finds the creature hiding out in a dog kennel and she names it Stitch. Lilo's sister who takes care of her buys Stitch for her in a last attempt to improve their home life while having a social worker is breathing down her neck about her ability to care for her little sibling. What follows is Lilo and Stitch's lessons in family and an intergalactic chase as Stitch's home planet tries to recover their experiment gone wrong.

Disney returns to its raw animation roots with 2002's Lilo and Stitch. After many films being spruced up with CGI graphics mixed in with traditional hand-drawn artwork, Disney has returned to a more simplistic art form, and it shows. But is this necessarily bad? No, in fact, it's rather refreshing. While Lilo and Stich is an downright odd film overall, especially for a Disney film, it still seems to work in the end. One of the problems it does have, though, is it doesn't go as far as it could.

Disney's animated features are none for being big and over-the-top. Something about Lilo and Stitch just felt like a big Saturday morning cartoon and not much more. It was a little too short and tended to focus a little too much on the turmoil with in Lilo's family and not enough of Stitch and the interaction between the two main characters. A lot of their key interaction moments were limited to a montage of scenes. At another point in the film, I don't want to give anything away, but if you see this you will know what I mean, they do include another montage of scenes with the 2 of them that elicits some of the best laughs. It just seemed like a tease for what could have been a series of really great scenes. The momentum once the story gets set up is a little too fast while a lot of the Nani and Lilo conflicts seemed to put a damper on the mood at times.

Another problem the film had was the supporting characters. Although they were decent and sufficient, they weren't exactly Kronk and Yzma from The Emperor's New Groove, Timon and Pumbaa from The Lion King, or the Genie from Aladdin. Lilo and Stich had a lot more potential to be better than it was, but it never really seemed to get to where it was meant to go. This may be because of an end sequence that had to be reworked after September 11th. Apparently, the film's final chase scene involved Stitch stealing a 747 from the Honolulu airport, flying it through the city itself, dodging things including skyscrapers, buildings, etc. Some of this was kept by replacing the 747 with a space ship, but there were still big enough changes made. With that aside, the film still managed to be pretty enjoyable despite its flaws and had enough heart to carry it along. (also, as a side note, for those who hate tarantulas or spiders, there's a scene where Stitch sees some TV sets in a window and a live action clip of a real tarantula horror movie is being shown on the screens)

In closing, Lilo and Stitch is a good movie for the family, but doesn't quite go as far as it could with developing the relationship between Lilo and Stitch that would have otherwise strengthened the film. If you have any questions or comments about the film before you see it (if you decide to), feel free to contact me. - John DiBiase (reviewed: 7/3/02)