I loved dark and weird things as a kid.
After school, I steadily worked my way through the Goosebumps collection at the local library. Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass stood like sentinels on my bookcase.
If anyone had asked me who I most wanted to be as a nine-year-old, I would have said Violet Baudelaire from Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. I once scrounged through the bathroom cabinets looking for a loose ribbon to tie my hair back in times of danger and quickly produce a surefire solution to escape. When I got my hands on a copy of Coraline in fourth grade, I was immediately drawn to the unsettling cover—the girl with button eyes, silhouetted by a candle in the dark.
Many of these stories acknowledge that children feel loss, grief, and neglect. They treat them with empathy and respect. We, as readers, are not supposed to laugh at them or mock them. We are supposed to understand them. We are supposed to support them.
Although a brightly-colored Disney film about a child and her alien pet, Lilo & Stitch (2002) similarly touches upon deeper issues of grief and trauma with a surprisingly thoughtful, warm lens. The thematic idea of ghosts—how to live with them and, perhaps, how to do better than them—resides in the heart of the story.
Early on in the film, Lilo follows a group of girls while walking home. When she asks if they’re going to play dolls, they freeze, startled, and hide their dolls behind their backs. Unperturbed, Lilo holds up her toy: a bulbous-headed “doll” with a scarecrow face, tufts of straw for hair, and an under-stuffed, limp body.
Proudly, Lilo says, “This is Scrump. I made her, but her head is too big. So I pretend a bug laid eggs in her ear and she’s upset because she only has a few more days to—”
When she looks up, she discovers that the girls have scattered. Her face falls. Angrily, she throws Scrump on the dirt and walks away. Almost immediately, she runs back, embracing the doll tightly, and begins her journey home.
While originally introduced as a “quirky” protagonist, narrative clues underpin much of Lilo’s behavior. At face value, perhaps she does seem like another strange girl, a precocious child who roots her actions in silly unpredictability. But the story values Lilo and undergirds the film with subtle details of her family’s backstory.
In the opening scene, Lilo bursts into her hula class, utterly distraught. Breathless, she explains to her teacher that she feeds a fish named Pudge every single morning. She always gives him a peanut butter sandwich. Today, however, she only had tuna at home and she couldn’t give him a tuna sandwich. She didn’t want to unwittingly make him a cannibal. As the teacher looks at her, kindhearted but confused, she adds, “Pudge controls the weather.”
Her nemesis, Myrtle, regards her disdainfully and says, “You’re crazy.” In response, tiny Lilo lunges at her, rolling on the floor.
It is an erratic, funny moment. Right away, the story lets us know that Lilo functions apart from her classmates. She doesn’t seem to have friends. She’s a brash storyteller. And she’s a fighter.
But there’s more.
As Lilo later reveals to her “pet,” the blue-furred alien Stitch, her parents died in a car accident during a storm. While her actions may appear irrational to others, her reasoning is anchored by an internal logic. In Lilo’s mind, she must feed Pudge every day because he decides whether or not it rains. If she does not feed him, then he might get angry. He might make it thunderstorm. And if it rains, again, then she might lose someone else she loves, again.
Here, we witness a series of decisions manifesting after an intensely traumatic flash point.
The film also draws out the themes of what it means to create a new kind of family, one that involves conscious rebuilding and effort. Although they fight loudly and often, Lilo’s older sister Nani remains fiercely protective of Lilo. Again, the narrative hints at a deeper, nuanced reality. In her bedroom, surfing trophies fill her shelves. There’s an implication that, perhaps, Nani sacrificed her surfing dreams to take care of Lilo.
Later, an explosive outburst from Stitch causes Nani to lose her waitressing job. When Lilo asks if it’s her fault that she got fired, Nani shakes her head. “Nah. The manager’s a vampire. He wanted me to join his legion of the undead.”
Lilo whispers, “I knew it!”
In this moment, Nani seems to draw from a prior conversation she had with her younger sister. Maybe Lilo had ventured this hypothesis before—and Nani remembered. Although overwhelmed by the abrupt loss of employment, she doesn’t blame her sister. Instead, she brings back that same theory and validates it, making Lilo feel better.
Nani never tells Lilo to act “normal.” She respects the way Lilo’s mind works. She loves her, unconditionally.
The broader narrative leans into this sense of nuanced esteem, recognizing not only the inner worlds of the primary characters but also paying homage to the realities of their heritage. The film does not forget that this is a story that takes place in Hawaii.
Two of the characters, Nani and David, are voiced by Hawaiian actors Tia Carrere and Jason Scott Lee. During production, they helped reword certain parts of the script, integrating Hawaiian slang and pronunciation into their lines.
A deleted scene from the film, which can be found on YouTube, more directly acknowledges the interlocking web of racism and tourism on the islands. As Lilo walks along the side of the road with Stitch, tourists gawk at her. A jeep of men yell, “Hey, speak English? Which way to the beach?” Wordlessly, she points to the right. Once Lilo reaches the ocean, a woman coos, “Oh, look! A real native!”
When Lilo discovers that the city is testing their siren alarms, she quickly unleashes revenge. She scrambles to get the attention of the onlookers, informing them that the beach contains tsunami sirens. At the first screech of the alarm, the crowd of tourists, panicked, stampede off the beach.
One of Lilo’s favorite pastimes involves snapping Polaroids of the white tourists that populate her home. In a way, she is wresting back control of her identity. She is no longer the one being looked at, studied, patronized. Instead, she takes a lens and turns it back on the interlopers. I am looking at you.
Even though Lilo is six, she’s not dumb. As a kid, I loved Lilo & Stitch precisely because it did not talk down to me. Lilo was a female protagonist who had questions, made jokes, reacted dramatically, and, still, exhibited bravery. She was stubborn and weird and she felt like a real girl.
Throughout the story, Lilo & Stitch juxtaposes real-world pains—financial loss, trauma, alienation—with the in-between joys of everyday life. After a long day where Nani fails to find a new job, she notices Lilo’s morose expression and, rather than fall into her grief, recommends an afternoon of surfing. She grabs her board and they slip into the ocean, Lilo by her side. They are not escaping their reality; rather, they are finding pockets of time where respite is a feature, not an unpredictable guest, of their day-to-day lives.
The film shows, over and over again, how hard Nani tries to establish stability in her younger sister’s life. She struggles and loses and fails not because of her own faults, but because there are no social resources for her and her sister.
When Lilo finds Stitch, she invites him into her small family with open arms. She wants to help him because she recognizes the inner machinations of his chaos. She sees him break things and cry secretly at night and she knows what that kind of loss feels like. He’s a wild creature who cannot verbalize the complications and complexities of his mind. Lilo herself has felt the exact same way. So she tries to pull Stitch up. Perhaps if she saves him, she can save herself. It is old-souled resilience disguised as snotty six-year-old chutzpah.
Near the end of the film, Stitch sums up the entire ethos of the story. He tells the leader of the alien delegation, “This is my family. I found it, all on my own. It’s little, and broken, but still good. Yeah. Still good.”
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