Sure, "Lilo & Stitch" was a mess.

At this point, I feel like attacking Disney's live-action films is just harping on their unstoppable mediocrity. However, every time I decide to give another one a chance, I'm still surprised by their capacity for making terrible creative decisions, something that becomes even more painful when we consider the fact that they're still quite successful and that the House of Mouse has no objective reason to make a course correction.

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With Lilo and Stitch, I had strangely high expectations, a direct consequence of the relatively modern aesthetic that accompanied the original film, as well as the cultural relevance that the co-starring creature has always had around the world, who, by the way, in many regions seems to even surpass that of Mickey Mouse.

Starting from a fairly successful cast (at least in aesthetic terms), Lilo and Stitch was a project that had a relatively easy chance of success, and at least at the box office, it proved to be.

The sad thing about the whole thing is that its quality leaves much to be desired, and we're left with a waste of memories that fails to capture the essence of the 2003 animated film, making us question whether it even needed to be produced in the first place.

What was originally a story with impeccable timing becomes a sequence of empty scenes that objectively replicate the same plot, but lack the heart that made it a classic in the first place.

While it's nice to see Stitch "in the real world," the sense of novelty wears off pretty quickly, and the wait to see him coexist with Lilo and Nani for the first time becomes unbearable.

The child protagonist, Maia Kealoha, does a decent job and is a perfect live-action replica of Lilo. However, the demanding role (whose seams were less evident in the animated version) makes her irregularities hard to ignore, especially when she must coexist with Stitch.

The running time is longer, scenes are added that ruin the film's momentum, the ending directly betrays the story's themes, and what used to be a display of irreverence within Walt Disney's catalog ends up being a very sanitized exposition of Hawaiian culture.

Score taken from my Letterboxd account.