Lilo and Stitch Live Action: No Fairy Tale Ending Here

So I saw the live action version of Lilo and Stitch with a friend. As expected, Stitch was a little chaos goblin through it all and Lilo bit off more than she could really chew by “adopting” him (but loved that little squirt anyway). Of course it had its differences — missing the major villain of the animated version, making Jumba even more of the bad guy than he was previously, and many of the scenes were obviously rewritten — but what everybody seems to complain about was the ending.

What’s wrong with it? For starters, it was no fairy-tale ending where everybody got everything they wanted except the villain. Well, Jumba did kind of get clobbered by a little girl and her alien “puppy” and got taken back into custody, but that’s about it.

It doesn’t even take place in a make-believe land. It’s Hawaii. Nani is a 19-year-old trying to raise her sister after their parents died, and quite frankly, it’s not going all that well. Hawaii’s social services worker is riding Nani’s behind about her inability to even keep food in the fridge. Lilo is so unpopular that she wishes for a friend on what she thinks is a falling star and acts up because she’s a frustrated six-year-old. Nani doesn’t think she’ll be able to even go to college because she’s got Lilo to worry about, plus she probably wouldn’t be able to pay for college without some massive student loans and/or a big fat scholarship.

Nani had to give up custody of Lilo so she could be something other than a struggling minimum wage worker who lost her job due to circumstances outside her control. This could be seen as a bad thing, but misses the idea that her neighbors could get approval from social services to watch Lilo while she joined the Marines studied to become a marine biologist. Nani could still chat with Lilo, and sometimes use that portal gun thing to pop in and check on her. Nani really did try, but was probably going to lose custody of Lilo eventually anyway. This outcome at least let her keep some small amount of control over the situation. Their house even got rebuilt after getting destroyed by Jumba.

More believable stuff in the ending:

• An athletic Hawaiian would be able to run across the ocean floor while holding something that was probably comparable to a boulder she could carry in her arms.
• Pleakley could easily pass for an overly enthusiastic tourist who thinks he knows more about local culture than he actually does. He’d just have to remember to change his appearance every so often so no one thinks anything other than that.
• Stitch will probably always have a “Chaotic” alignment even if he’s figured out that he can be something other than Chaotic Evil. Any chaos he and Lilo get involved in could be chalked up to a little girl and a strange-looking puppy that doesn’t know any better, at least for a while.

So it’s not a perfect fairy-tale ending. It probably wasn’t ever going to be if they wanted to make a movie that’s at least a little more realistic.

…But maybe you’d just prefer the animated version.