Lilo & Stitch / Read-Along
Lilo & Stitchmay not send waves of nostalgia shooting through parents or pack Pooh's merchandising punch, but this Disney outing won't fizzle from the screen, either. The proof's in the read-along, which, like the movie, reaches out and grabs anybody who reserves a soft spot forElvis Presley, space monsters more wacky than Alf and as adorable as E.T., surfer dudes, and sweet, struggling orphans--that is, everybody. Shrink-wrapped here is a tsunami of options for interactive fun; how your 5- to 10-year-old chooses to shoot the curves is up to her. In a PC or Mac the story scrolls by with the read-along version of subtitles, and in the stereo it shifts into a do-it-yourself bedtime story. With a Walkman, the cassette carries the capacity to wipe out car-trip crabbiness. But that owes more to the story than to the simple tedium-chasing properties of flipping pages and following along. Stitch, an illegal creation banished to an asteroid, jumps spaceship and arrives on the shores of Hawaii, where he sets about screwing up everything for a little girl, Lilo, bent on displaying her best behavior to a social worker convinced her sister's not a suitable guardian. To tame the rascally Martian, Lilo assigns him a role model--the King. From there, factor in the ever-effective Disney formula: wrong-moment bouts of misbehavior, nick-of-time getaways from the bad guys, and a hunk-a hunk-a sadness when it looks like all's lost (which, of course, it isn't). Ving Rhames and Tia Carrere hoist the character voices to big-star Hollywood heights, and once Stitch-as-Elvis leaves the building, a sense of together-we'll-triumph sweetness sticks around, stacking the odds that kids will return for lots of aloha revisits.--Tammy La Gorce