Lilo & Stitch
Eesh. I watched this movie ages ago, but this is the first chance I've had to really sit down and write this out. As per usual in my life, shit just kept happening---lots of pain, bouts of deeper depression, and then Namine was sick and then died, and Magnet was depressed, and friends, and then it was Lys's birthday....
And now a couple more months have passed, and it's now December, not October anymore. And more stuff has happened. My dog Penny has now been put down, and a friend of my dad's had a heart attack and died in his car, another friend also had a heart attack (thankfully, his was mild and he's been doing better), and....
Ahem. Yeah. Lots and lots of stuff. So, I'm gonna just get on with actually talking about Lilo & Stitch now, yeah? ^^
Damn. I just keep wanting to use so many Pleakley quotes at the cut, there.
Anyway, so, let's start with my history with this movie, eh?
....*shrugs* I honestly don't think it's much to write home about. Sure, I saw it back when it was first out, and greatly enjoyed it. I've seen this first movie sparingly a couple of times over the years, but my family has never actually owned a copy of it. I think Lys was actually way more in love with at least Stitch than me, as she's the one that insisted getting one of the sequels---I think it was Stitch: The Movie, but we also saw the other one, Stitch Has A Glitch (at least, I'm pretty sure there were two sequel movies? My memory may be failing me on this one. But I'm under the distinct impression that the former lead directly into the Disney Channel TV series, and the other one scared me because I almost honestly thought that Stitch had died at the end or something (yeah. I can be gullible. So sue me)), and we also were fans of the TV series (for me, mostly because of Experiment 625, but whatever :P).
Anyway, my point is, while I've always liked this movie, and acknowledged it being on the good end of Disney movies, it also wasn't a movie that I felt overly compelled to purchase or obsess over (I don't know if any of you have noticed (XP), but I do that. Obsess over things a lot, very passionately. Too much so, really).
For the record, I blame R-girl for things being different this time around.
Seriously, dearest, it's all your fault for ranting about how much you loved this movie and it wasn't long after I'd reread your comments that I'd watched this movie again, and ARGH EVERYTHING IS NOW YOUR FAULT. ;)
Lilo & Stitch is still not my personal favorite Disney movie (because let's be real here, nothing's going to be topping The Fox and the Hound for me anytime soon, or, like, ever), but I will say that I think it's one of the top best Disney movies ever made (maybe even in my top ten, I don't know), and if I ever had to introduce someone to Disney, this movie would be my movie of choice to start with.
(Next would be Aladdin, and then The Lion King, followed by Mulan, because I've got priorities. XD My first instinct would be
to start with Lion King, but...for an absolute first time Disney viewer, I can't help but think that it's cruel to start with a movie that had something as tragic as Mufasa's death in it. These are my feelings, and so I'd start with the other two first to ease in, because tragedy or not, Lion King is still a must-see movie.)
Woo, rabbit trails. ANYWAY AGAIN, KIRYN, BUT THE POINT IS that I blame R-girl for the fact that I was obsessed with the movie this time around.
And seriously, it was so, so bad. So bad that I couldn't even read my Harry Potter book because the movie was playing on an endless repeat in my head. Literally my brain was reciting every line, word for word, from start to finish, EVEN IN MY DREAMS, because my brain hates me like that. YEAH. It is very distracting, trying to immerse yourself into another narrative, any other narrative, when your brain does shit like this to you.
So, yeah. For about a week, Obsession, thy name was Lilo & Stitch. *headdesk* And then, even in the now couple of months it's been since I saw the movie, my brain has still been writing this very LJ post in my head, and has been breaking down and analyzing the parts of the movie that I'd noted to myself to discuss, and just....
Fucking hell, this movie.
And now, I'm not going to delay myself any longer from at least writing a bit more on this entry, before my brain starts to go (even more) stark raving insane. Okay? Okay.
Of course, now that I'm actually writing this down, my carefully and very well thought-over deserts me. Typical. In any case, this may not be very coherent, and I don't quite know how to start this, but hopefully it'll come out well enough.
What I'm trying to figure out how to say, exactly, is that Lilo & Stitch is a rather deceptive movie, both in-universe and on a meta level for me. Maybe it's because of my lack of history that I had with this movie than, say, The Fox and the Hound, but there are actually a metric fuckton of things about this movie that my brain didn't connect the dots and get, and that now when I watched it again with the intent to pay more attention, just seem so incredibly fucking obvious.
For example, there's a scene when Cobra Bubbles instructs Lilo that he expects her to turn her 'dog' into a "model citizen". This has never exactly broken my suspension of disbelief, but it always struck me as an odd thing to say because, hello, it's a dog (or at least, that's what everyone accepts and assumes Stitch to be), and dogs can't be model citizens because the wording implies the expectation to participate in the society as would a person.
Cue my brain derailing this time around with the realization that, wait, Cobra Bubbles fucking knew that Stitch was an alien all along, and that's why he freaked out so much (for Cobra Bubbles, anyway; it's really quite incredible how much his demeanor changes after he sees Stitch) and was so insistent about the "model citizen" thing. He knew exactly what he was saying.
My point is that the dots were there. My brain was just obtuse and didn't connect them for the longest time. Granted, you're not supposed to be able to the first time around, but once you know that detail about Cobra's knowledge? The reason for his behavior becomes incredibly obvious in hindsight.
So then, because I am me, I had to question myself on why the hell it took me so long to connect the dots, relative lack of viewings aside.
It was TV Tropes that actually shed some light on the situation with its description of the movie, which is when I realized that the truth of the matter is that Lilo & Stitch is deceptive. As they put it, it's a slapstick comedy with aliens with a dark, horribly realistic undertone. In slapstick, you just go with the flow and accept the ridiculous, which is why, apart from some lampshade hanging, no one really questions the 'fact' that Stitch is a dog or whether Jumbaa and Pleakley could truly pass as believable humans. Therefore, even if you know that Cobra Bubbles knows about aliens and has seen and talked with them before, it's easy to just continue going with the slapstick flow and think that Cobra is going along with you too.
This slapstick is also what makes it rather easy to gloss over the rather darker aspects of the main plot and conflict with Lilo and Nani. But once you look at it without the filter of the alien hijinks....suddenly, I'm not as ashamed as I've always been about the fact that I always cry during this movie, and indeed cried at several more parts where I hadn't before.
Again, with slapstick, you just assume and accept things at face value. So when Lilo tells Nani that "people treat me different", and Nani responds with, "They just don't know what to say," I always just assumed that what they meant is that Lilo is weird and has no friends, and that she's always been this way. But this time, I realized that no, that actually probably wasn't what they were subtlely implying at all, and that I'd seriously missed the bus, re: timeline. See, somehow my brain translated their parents' deaths as happening 'a long time ago', even though there's so much fucking evidence that actually, no, it's only been a few months, at the most. Because if their parents' accident had happened years ago, like I'd been assuming, why was Nani still meeting with social workers to get custody of Lilo, why were Nani and Lilo behaving as if they don't know how to behave in the roles their parents' death has forced upon them, why don't they look all that much younger in the picture Lilo keeps of all of them?
And suddenly, I realized that when Lilo says, "People treat me different," she means that they're treating her different from before, and not just different from everyone else, which is what I'd been thinking. Nani means that they don't know what to say about her parents' deaths (because as small as their town is, I find it hard to believe that people wouldn't know), not that they've never known what to say to Lilo. That Lilo had probably only recently developed an interest in voodoo, that Scrump wasn't an old doll, or her interest in photography, or even her belief that Pudge the fish needs a peanut butter sandwich as an offering, and that he controls the weather (and Nani's apparent acceptance of this belief). And it makes more sense why Lilo's hula instructor engages her the way that he does. (His soft, "Maybe we'd better call your sister," indicates to me that he recognizes Lilo's aggression as stemming from her struggle to deal with the deaths of her parents, and not as "this is normal behavior of Lilo dealing with the bullies that she's always had" (and why, for that matter, Lilo thinks of the other girls as her friends: this falling out is recent, and not the way things have always been).)
In short, Lilo isn't a weird girl that's always been weird. She's a girl that is dealing with a trauma and upheaval that she has no frame of reference for, and is therefore acting out and latching onto things in an attempt to do so, and in the process comes across as "weird", especially to the girls that she is now fundamentally, irrevocably different from.
The sound that you hear in the distance is that of my heart breaking. :(
On the other side, we get Nani, who isn't doing any better, really, as she adjusts from being probably a relatively carefree teenager to a single mom that's also dealing with the trauma of losing her parents. Suddenly, Cobra Bubbles and Nani's attitude toward him (horror, desperation to please him, anger) make sense on a level they hadn't before, as does the way Nani and Lilo treat each other. These girls aren't ones who have had a lot of time to adjust to being without their parents, plain and simple. Now I can see their brittleness for what it is: a grief that's threatening to overwhelm everything else.
And then I look and think about the critics of Disney who say that it's only for little kids, like that decreases its quality, like that means that kids only enjoy stupid, insipid, forgettable things that adults can't find any substance or enjoyment out of. And I can't help but wonder, what fucking movie are you watching? Because it's definitely not the same one that I am.
Sure, there's a lot of slapstick alien comedy that is incredibly entertaining to watch, but there's also a painfully realistic and dark undertone to it through the story of Lilo and Nani, and Disney somehow masterfully strikes a balance between the two. There's a subtlely and finesse to the storytelling of this movie that people don't seem to expect Disney to be able to create or execute. Lilo & Stitch is a wonderful movie taken on its own at face value, but there's so, so much more substance to be had, if a person only dipped their toes just a bit underneath the surface.
There is, of course, a hell of a lot more that I can talk about with this movie. I could talk about how Pleakley is basically a tranny, ruminate on the relationship between David, Lilo, and Nani, speculate why Gantu takes the violence in the seemingly outlier (to the rest of alien society) of Jumbaa (as indicated by his relish in creating destructive monsters) even further than Jumbaa ever did (as Jumbaa actually shows some sympathy towards Nani, preventing Stitch from punching her once, and in his attitude towards her loss of Lilo, whereas Gantu merely regards Lilo as a "snack" to be eaten by what he considers an "abomination"). But honestly, I feel that I'm just going to leave this post as it is for now, and maybe come back to edit more shit in at a later date, or else I'll just discuss these things in the potential comments! ;)
o ~ o ~ o
"You're just jealous because I'm pretty!" -Pleakley
o ~ o ~ o
And now a couple more months have passed, and it's now December, not October anymore. And more stuff has happened. My dog Penny has now been put down, and a friend of my dad's had a heart attack and died in his car, another friend also had a heart attack (thankfully, his was mild and he's been doing better), and....
Ahem. Yeah. Lots and lots of stuff. So, I'm gonna just get on with actually talking about Lilo & Stitch now, yeah? ^^
Damn. I just keep wanting to use so many Pleakley quotes at the cut, there.
Anyway, so, let's start with my history with this movie, eh?
....*shrugs* I honestly don't think it's much to write home about. Sure, I saw it back when it was first out, and greatly enjoyed it. I've seen this first movie sparingly a couple of times over the years, but my family has never actually owned a copy of it. I think Lys was actually way more in love with at least Stitch than me, as she's the one that insisted getting one of the sequels---I think it was Stitch: The Movie, but we also saw the other one, Stitch Has A Glitch (at least, I'm pretty sure there were two sequel movies? My memory may be failing me on this one. But I'm under the distinct impression that the former lead directly into the Disney Channel TV series, and the other one scared me because I almost honestly thought that Stitch had died at the end or something (yeah. I can be gullible. So sue me)), and we also were fans of the TV series (for me, mostly because of Experiment 625, but whatever :P).
Anyway, my point is, while I've always liked this movie, and acknowledged it being on the good end of Disney movies, it also wasn't a movie that I felt overly compelled to purchase or obsess over (I don't know if any of you have noticed (XP), but I do that. Obsess over things a lot, very passionately. Too much so, really).
For the record, I blame R-girl for things being different this time around.
Seriously, dearest, it's all your fault for ranting about how much you loved this movie and it wasn't long after I'd reread your comments that I'd watched this movie again, and ARGH EVERYTHING IS NOW YOUR FAULT. ;)
Lilo & Stitch is still not my personal favorite Disney movie (because let's be real here, nothing's going to be topping The Fox and the Hound for me anytime soon, or, like, ever), but I will say that I think it's one of the top best Disney movies ever made (maybe even in my top ten, I don't know), and if I ever had to introduce someone to Disney, this movie would be my movie of choice to start with.
(Next would be Aladdin, and then The Lion King, followed by Mulan, because I've got priorities. XD My first instinct would be
to start with Lion King, but...for an absolute first time Disney viewer, I can't help but think that it's cruel to start with a movie that had something as tragic as Mufasa's death in it. These are my feelings, and so I'd start with the other two first to ease in, because tragedy or not, Lion King is still a must-see movie.)
Woo, rabbit trails. ANYWAY AGAIN, KIRYN, BUT THE POINT IS that I blame R-girl for the fact that I was obsessed with the movie this time around.
And seriously, it was so, so bad. So bad that I couldn't even read my Harry Potter book because the movie was playing on an endless repeat in my head. Literally my brain was reciting every line, word for word, from start to finish, EVEN IN MY DREAMS, because my brain hates me like that. YEAH. It is very distracting, trying to immerse yourself into another narrative, any other narrative, when your brain does shit like this to you.
So, yeah. For about a week, Obsession, thy name was Lilo & Stitch. *headdesk* And then, even in the now couple of months it's been since I saw the movie, my brain has still been writing this very LJ post in my head, and has been breaking down and analyzing the parts of the movie that I'd noted to myself to discuss, and just....
Fucking hell, this movie.
And now, I'm not going to delay myself any longer from at least writing a bit more on this entry, before my brain starts to go (even more) stark raving insane. Okay? Okay.
Of course, now that I'm actually writing this down, my carefully and very well thought-over deserts me. Typical. In any case, this may not be very coherent, and I don't quite know how to start this, but hopefully it'll come out well enough.
What I'm trying to figure out how to say, exactly, is that Lilo & Stitch is a rather deceptive movie, both in-universe and on a meta level for me. Maybe it's because of my lack of history that I had with this movie than, say, The Fox and the Hound, but there are actually a metric fuckton of things about this movie that my brain didn't connect the dots and get, and that now when I watched it again with the intent to pay more attention, just seem so incredibly fucking obvious.
For example, there's a scene when Cobra Bubbles instructs Lilo that he expects her to turn her 'dog' into a "model citizen". This has never exactly broken my suspension of disbelief, but it always struck me as an odd thing to say because, hello, it's a dog (or at least, that's what everyone accepts and assumes Stitch to be), and dogs can't be model citizens because the wording implies the expectation to participate in the society as would a person.
Cue my brain derailing this time around with the realization that, wait, Cobra Bubbles fucking knew that Stitch was an alien all along, and that's why he freaked out so much (for Cobra Bubbles, anyway; it's really quite incredible how much his demeanor changes after he sees Stitch) and was so insistent about the "model citizen" thing. He knew exactly what he was saying.
My point is that the dots were there. My brain was just obtuse and didn't connect them for the longest time. Granted, you're not supposed to be able to the first time around, but once you know that detail about Cobra's knowledge? The reason for his behavior becomes incredibly obvious in hindsight.
So then, because I am me, I had to question myself on why the hell it took me so long to connect the dots, relative lack of viewings aside.
It was TV Tropes that actually shed some light on the situation with its description of the movie, which is when I realized that the truth of the matter is that Lilo & Stitch is deceptive. As they put it, it's a slapstick comedy with aliens with a dark, horribly realistic undertone. In slapstick, you just go with the flow and accept the ridiculous, which is why, apart from some lampshade hanging, no one really questions the 'fact' that Stitch is a dog or whether Jumbaa and Pleakley could truly pass as believable humans. Therefore, even if you know that Cobra Bubbles knows about aliens and has seen and talked with them before, it's easy to just continue going with the slapstick flow and think that Cobra is going along with you too.
This slapstick is also what makes it rather easy to gloss over the rather darker aspects of the main plot and conflict with Lilo and Nani. But once you look at it without the filter of the alien hijinks....suddenly, I'm not as ashamed as I've always been about the fact that I always cry during this movie, and indeed cried at several more parts where I hadn't before.
Again, with slapstick, you just assume and accept things at face value. So when Lilo tells Nani that "people treat me different", and Nani responds with, "They just don't know what to say," I always just assumed that what they meant is that Lilo is weird and has no friends, and that she's always been this way. But this time, I realized that no, that actually probably wasn't what they were subtlely implying at all, and that I'd seriously missed the bus, re: timeline. See, somehow my brain translated their parents' deaths as happening 'a long time ago', even though there's so much fucking evidence that actually, no, it's only been a few months, at the most. Because if their parents' accident had happened years ago, like I'd been assuming, why was Nani still meeting with social workers to get custody of Lilo, why were Nani and Lilo behaving as if they don't know how to behave in the roles their parents' death has forced upon them, why don't they look all that much younger in the picture Lilo keeps of all of them?
And suddenly, I realized that when Lilo says, "People treat me different," she means that they're treating her different from before, and not just different from everyone else, which is what I'd been thinking. Nani means that they don't know what to say about her parents' deaths (because as small as their town is, I find it hard to believe that people wouldn't know), not that they've never known what to say to Lilo. That Lilo had probably only recently developed an interest in voodoo, that Scrump wasn't an old doll, or her interest in photography, or even her belief that Pudge the fish needs a peanut butter sandwich as an offering, and that he controls the weather (and Nani's apparent acceptance of this belief). And it makes more sense why Lilo's hula instructor engages her the way that he does. (His soft, "Maybe we'd better call your sister," indicates to me that he recognizes Lilo's aggression as stemming from her struggle to deal with the deaths of her parents, and not as "this is normal behavior of Lilo dealing with the bullies that she's always had" (and why, for that matter, Lilo thinks of the other girls as her friends: this falling out is recent, and not the way things have always been).)
In short, Lilo isn't a weird girl that's always been weird. She's a girl that is dealing with a trauma and upheaval that she has no frame of reference for, and is therefore acting out and latching onto things in an attempt to do so, and in the process comes across as "weird", especially to the girls that she is now fundamentally, irrevocably different from.
The sound that you hear in the distance is that of my heart breaking. :(
On the other side, we get Nani, who isn't doing any better, really, as she adjusts from being probably a relatively carefree teenager to a single mom that's also dealing with the trauma of losing her parents. Suddenly, Cobra Bubbles and Nani's attitude toward him (horror, desperation to please him, anger) make sense on a level they hadn't before, as does the way Nani and Lilo treat each other. These girls aren't ones who have had a lot of time to adjust to being without their parents, plain and simple. Now I can see their brittleness for what it is: a grief that's threatening to overwhelm everything else.
And then I look and think about the critics of Disney who say that it's only for little kids, like that decreases its quality, like that means that kids only enjoy stupid, insipid, forgettable things that adults can't find any substance or enjoyment out of. And I can't help but wonder, what fucking movie are you watching? Because it's definitely not the same one that I am.
Sure, there's a lot of slapstick alien comedy that is incredibly entertaining to watch, but there's also a painfully realistic and dark undertone to it through the story of Lilo and Nani, and Disney somehow masterfully strikes a balance between the two. There's a subtlely and finesse to the storytelling of this movie that people don't seem to expect Disney to be able to create or execute. Lilo & Stitch is a wonderful movie taken on its own at face value, but there's so, so much more substance to be had, if a person only dipped their toes just a bit underneath the surface.
There is, of course, a hell of a lot more that I can talk about with this movie. I could talk about how Pleakley is basically a tranny, ruminate on the relationship between David, Lilo, and Nani, speculate why Gantu takes the violence in the seemingly outlier (to the rest of alien society) of Jumbaa (as indicated by his relish in creating destructive monsters) even further than Jumbaa ever did (as Jumbaa actually shows some sympathy towards Nani, preventing Stitch from punching her once, and in his attitude towards her loss of Lilo, whereas Gantu merely regards Lilo as a "snack" to be eaten by what he considers an "abomination"). But honestly, I feel that I'm just going to leave this post as it is for now, and maybe come back to edit more shit in at a later date, or else I'll just discuss these things in the potential comments! ;)
o ~ o ~ o
"You're just jealous because I'm pretty!" -Pleakley
o ~ o ~ o