PG, 85 min.
Directors: Dean DuBlois,
Chris Sanders
Writers: Chris Sanders, Dean
DuBlois
Voices: Daveigh Chase, Tia
Carrere, David Ogden Stiers, Kevin McDonald, Ving Rhames, Chris Sanders, Zoe
Caldwell, Jason Scott Lee, Kevin Michael Richardson
It’s been a while since I’ve
seen this one. Out of the blue, my twelve-year-old requested this movie for our
weekly family movie night. He watched it endlessly when he was little. He’s our
only kid who had the patience for movies in those formative years. I guess he
was feeling nostalgic.
Anyway, watching this has
made me realize just how much innocence has been lost in family films just over
the past decade. “Lilo & Stitch” is just a sweet film. I’m not sure they
make those anymore, even for families. Take a look at “The Croods” from last
year. The title says it all. Being crude is more important in a “family” film
than promoting family values. And that’s a movie that does promote family
values; they just aren’t as high on the filmmakers’ priority list.
Now, because it is innocent,
it seems targeted more for kids than adults than what we’re used to today. Man,
we adults just mess everything up. In Hollywood’s push to broaden their
audiences and please the parents who attend animated fare as much as the
children, the children have been pushed right out of the equation.
Look at Stitch here. He’s
supposed to be a menacing monster at first, but softens once he becomes part of
a family. However, he’s pretty cute and funny to begin with. There’s never any
real threat to anything going on because everything is pretty goofy. And,
instead of the message of family values being a side note to the jokes, it is
the main thrust of the story. The characters are totally relatable, rather than
caricatures of family members. Lilo reminds me so much of a little girl I know,
that it’s hard to believe she didn’t even exist at that time to be the
personality on which Lilo was based.
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