Cute, but needlessly violent

Rating: Null/10 (14 June 2010)

"Lilo and Stitch" is one of the better Disney flicks released in recent years. Some points...
1. The film eschews CGI in favour for traditional hand drawn cell animation and a palette of beautiful water colours (water colour backgrounds haven't been used by Disney since the 1940s).
2. The plot is a merger of "Critters" and "ET", in which a little girl befriends an alien and learns various life lessons. Though at times generic, the film has enough interesting flourishes to differentiate it from most other Disney flicks.
3. The alien at the heart of the picture is not a cutesy creature, but a military weapon designed to destroy planets. Half the fun of the picture is watching this thing crawling about, cleverly adapting to situations and juggling its biological need to destroy with that of self-preservation.
4. The character of Lilo is not your typical Disney kid, but a truly bizarre little girl who mutters matter-of-fact statements about a fish who controls the weather and a stuffed doll whose days are numbered because a bug laid eggs in its ear.
5. The film tries hard to mimic the style and tone of Hayao Miyazaki, but doesn't quite manage.
6. There's some neat psychology in the film. Stitch is like the embodiment of Lilo's self-destructiveness, her need to destroy everything, lashing out because she's an outcast and lost her parents in an accident. By taming Stitch, Lilo tames her own inner turmoil.
7. Like "ET", the alien is a sort of surrogate family member who heals the family unit.
8. The opening coda and the final act are weak. You have a nice character study here, which is constantly being sabotaged by erroneous crap. Less action scenes and more drama would have turned this into something special. IE – "My Neighbour Totoro".
9. The opening credit sequence is great.
10. The film has (typical for Disney) two annoying, motor-mouthed characters, and the film too often resorts to violence to solve its problems.
7.5/10 – Great in parts, but fizzles out.
Worth one viewing.