If you ever needed more proof that Disney’s live-action adaptations don’t have the sauce of their animated source material, look no further than the Lilo & Stitch trailer. Sure, Stitch, the not-dog alien that sets the events of the film into motion, looks fittingly hideous. I’m glad to hear they let the original movie’s director and lead actor, Chris Sanders, reprise his role as the little blue guy. However, one change that’s being made for this adaptation feels like it was done both to cut corners in the animation department and to allow for a cowardly pivot away from one of the original film’s best bits. I’m talking about swapping alien dynamic duo Jumba (Zach Galifianakis) and Pleakley (Billy Magnussen) out of their improvised human disguises into a more straightforward hologram that lets the film simply use the human actors.
In the original film, Jumba and Pleakley are sent to Earth to retrieve Stitch, who escapes to the planet and crashlands in Hawaii. The two are very clearly alien and have to carry out their mission incognito. They do this by grabbing whatever human clothes they can to create disguises. The joke is that the two are clearly still aliens, but while Jumba looks like he just rolled out of bed and grabbed whatever was nearby, Pleakley is seen in elaborate outfits, typically in drag, with the two cosplaying as a married couple to blend in. He’s putting in the effort and can lip sync for his life at the drop of a hat.
Now, Disney is going a much more straightforward route for live-action. It looks like Jumba and Pleakley will be using holograms to appear human for parts of the film, allowing Galifianakis and Magnussen to be on-screen as the aliens’ “human” forms rather than just voicing the characters. The trade-off here is that not only is one of the original movie’s running gags lost in translation, but fans are annoyed that Pleakley is seemingly no longer in drag in the live-action adaptation. Some are saying this might just be a way to lower animation costs for the film, while others are more suspicious that it could be in reaction to something that was seen as a harmless gag 20 years ago but could now be read by the worst people you know as some kind of “woke” propaganda promoting same-sex relationships, drag, or cross-dressing.
Alongside the usual tomato-throwing from classic Disney fans who consider these live-action remakes uncreative cash grabs that devalue the original animated films, the Lilo & Stitch remake has also been the subject of a fair bit of bespoke controversy, with some accusing the film of whitewashing its Native Hawaiian characters. Inevitably, the movie will make half a billion dollars at the box office and no lessons will be learned. At least we’ll always have cunty Pleakley in the animated movie.