Here’s a story about two films, released 23 years apart from one another. One is a remake of the other. They are, understandably, both titled Lilo & Stitch.

The original is an animated feature, released in 2002 by the Walt Disney Animation Studio. Even today it remains a unique production among the company’s body of work. Unlike typical animated films, which would be developed in committee and produced under extensive executive oversight, Lilo & Stitch was developed by a single animator – Chris Sanders – and then written and directed by Sanders and colleague Dean DeBlois with a modestly sized team of animators and a smaller-than-average budget. (Stitch costs $80m to make; its immediate predecessor Atlantis: The Lost Empire is estimated to have cost as much as $120m.) The end result was a masterpiece.

This is never a word I use lightly when it comes to film. To date WDAS has released 62 animated features, from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to Moana 2, and while many of them have been wonderful films only a select few have really stood head-and-shoulders above their peers. Lilo & Stitch is such a distinctive film not simply for its immense quality but because of how much it stands out from all of the others.

Consider this: it was the first Disney animated feature not to be directly based on a pre-existing fairy tale, children’s book, novel, or play. Stitch is entirely Sanders’ own creation – so much so that he voices the character himself. The level to which the character stands in contrast to the Disney canon ultimately became the core of the film’s marketing campaign.

In brief, for those who have come in 23 years late: a genetically engineered alien creature escapes captivity, steals a spacecraft, and crash-lands on a Hawaiian island. There it is adopted by a six-year-old girl named Lilo (Daveigh Chase), who mistakenly believes it to be a dog. Renamed Stitch, the creature violently disrupts the lives of Lilo and her guardian sister Nani (Tia Carrere) while avoiding the aliens who have followed it to Earth.

The film is an outstanding comedy. The humour stems from the characters and their interactions, as well as the sharp contrast between the film’s intergalactic raygun-wielding aliens and its sleepy Hawaiian setting. The violent potential of Stitch’s rampages is exploited to full anarchic effect. There has rarely been a line of dialogue as funny as young Lilo, on the telephone to a 911 responder in the middle of an action scene, loudly declaring ‘oh good! My dog found the chainsaw!’ It is the best kind of children’s film: the one that takes creative risks, and which presents it audience with material that is almost (but not quite) inappropriate for them to see.

It is beautifully designed, with a distinct aesthetic inspired by Sanders’ own artwork. A deliberate choice was made to render the film’s various backgrounds in watercolours rather than gouache, and this allows the film a visual richness akin to the earliest of Disney’s animations. While there is CGI in the mix, it is mostly used to render the film’s various alien spaceships and technology – and that has the brilliant effect of making them contrast the more organic, green and blue shades of the Hawaiian coastline.

The film boasts strong and appealing vocal performances by Chase and Carrere, as well as co-stars Ving Rhames, Jason Scott Lee, David Ogden Stiers, and others. They seem to particularly excel because they have been given interesting dialogue to recite, and rounded characters to play. Everybody has a story arc in Lilo & Stitch. Everybody, in one manner or another, finds an opportunity to learn and change.

Best of all, the film is actually about something. Lilo and Nani begin the film mourning the death of their parents; it is remarkably understated and few details are given. It is a tremendously smart move, since the less details exist the more of the audience will find emotional resonance there. Child protection services are biting at Nani’s heels to provide a better life for Lilo. At the same time the film foregrounds Stitch: not born but made, and without parents or family. The merging of the three characters by film’s end into a found family is unexpectedly profound stuff for a children’s cartoon. What is more, the film takes pains to point out that their family is not perfect. Stitch, not usually the most verbose of characters, expresses this in the film’s emotional dénouement: ‘This is my family. I found it, all on my own. It’s little, and broken, but still good.’

I am honestly not certain which of Disney’s animated features most deserves the title of all-time best, but if you were to suggest Lilo & Stitch it would surely be one of several correct choices.

Just forward to 2025, and Lilo & Stitch is the latest in a long line of live-action (or, at least, somewhat photo-realistic) remakes of Disney’s animated properties. This particular film was produced with a Disney+ streaming premiere in mind, akin to a 20th century premiere on the Disney Channel, but then bumped to movie theatres once it became clear how popular it would be. This is perhaps worth keeping in mind, since a limited budget – this film cost in 2025 only a little than what the original cost in 2002 – restricts how it can match the earlier action and set pieces. There are things missing, including one major alien character, and the narrative has been trimmed and folded to accommodate their absence.

This is not necessarily a bad thing, and the trick with Disney’s remakes is finding what elements work better in live-action and then emphasising those. It is the approach that made surprisingly good results in Christopher Robin (2018) and Lady and the Tramp (2019) but made tedious misfires – albeit hugely successful ones – out of The Lion King (2019) and The Little Mermaid (2023).

Sydney Elizebeth Agudong plays Nani, and gives the film’s most vital and emotive performance. While Maia Kealoha is very sweet as Lilo, it is Agudong who gives the film its emotional through-line and most effective moments. Not that Tia Carrere is left out in the cold in this remake. Thanks to a spot of canny rewriting, she makes an appealing contribution as social worker Mrs Kekoa – sent to assess Nani’s suitability to act as Lilo’s guardian.

The film is visually quite reasonable. given its budget and original screening venue, and while Disney may have afforded it a more elaborate visual sheen if originally intended for cinemas, what is on the screen is perfectly appropriate for its family audience. Sadly where the film is let down is in script, direction, and editing. General audiences will find the film broadly enjoyable, and no doubt a large portion of its younger fanbase will view it incessantly. They are all of them, sadly, watching a substandard film.

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t: this new Lilo & Stitch is trapped by remaking what was already an outstanding film. Copy an old joke, and it likely will not play as freshly as the original film. Replace it with a new joke, and it likely will not be as funny as the one being replaced. Lilo & Stitch (2025) is a nervous patchwork of good gags and bad, and a lot of awkward muddles in the middle where scenes could have better had their makers picked a side and jumped off the fence. I laughed more than a few times, to be fair, but more often I felt disappointed.

Director Dean Fleischer Camp provides a lot of unnecessary muddles of his own. The film is edited much, much too rapidly, with scenes of dialogue jumping from one shot to another without any space for medium or wide shots of the entire scene. The film feels so afraid of boring its audience that it is always cutting, and this rapidly becomes exhausting to watch. It also kills any sense of rhythm in the film. There is no space left for dialogue to have resonance, or for jokes to land, or simply for the viewer to take a breath and get their bearings in the piece.

My gut tells me that new viewers, for whom the original Lilo & Stitch is an old, irrelevant relic, will enjoy the new iteration to a reasonable degree, but anybody with a shred of investment in Chris Sander and Dean DeBlois’ work will be sorely disappointed. This was always going to be a tricky needle to thread, so perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised to see it struggle.