{"id":146043,"date":"2025-05-31T05:53:09","date_gmt":"2025-05-31T05:53:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/146043\/"},"modified":"2025-05-31T05:53:09","modified_gmt":"2025-05-31T05:53:09","slug":"lilo-and-stitch-live-action-remake-changes-original-ending-ohana-use","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/146043\/","title":{"rendered":"Lilo and Stitch Live-Action Remake Changes Original Ending, Ohana Use"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tDisney<\/a>\u2019s live-action version of Lilo & Stitch<\/a> made quite the splash when it debuted to the biggest Memorial Day opening weekend<\/a> ever. But the film remake of the 2002 animated original about a Hawaiian girl and her frisky alien friend also spurred extensive debate surrounding changes to the narrative, particularly its ending.<\/p>\n

\n\tOne recent viral post<\/a> on X (formerly Twitter) noted that a scene in the first movie in which Lilo and older sister Nani bond over the Hawaiian concept of \u201cohana\u201d is changed in the new one. This led another user to post<\/a> that it is \u201cnot crazy to say this movie is pro-colonize Hawaii propaganda.\u201d (Spoilers are ahead.) The follow-up comment, which has received more than 200,000 likes, spurred debate over the new version\u2019s ending, in which Nani (played by Sydney Elizebeth Agudong) moves to California for college and agrees to give up Lilo (Maia Kealoha) to the state, with the girl being raised by a neighbor. In the original film, Nani remained Lilo\u2019s legal guardian.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe original movie was so much about being against the carceral system in terms of foster care, Stitch\u2019s imprisonment and the colonial system as a whole in Hawaii,\u201d author Mariah Rigg, who was born and raised on Oahu, tells The Hollywood Reporter. \u201cI was fully surprised at the remake\u2019s ending, in terms of Nani leaving the state altogether. Obviously, there is all this discourse on how \u2018ohana means family\u2019 is not really represented in that ending, but in an even larger way, it\u2019s harmful on how it contributes to the narrative of displacement of Hawaiians from their ancestral lands.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tDirector Dean Fleischer Camp\u2019s live-action Lilo & Stitch tapped into an unexpected fan base, collecting more money at the global box office in its opening four-day weekend than the first feature did in its entire run. Critics were generally impressed, as the new film holds a 69 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with THR\u2019s own review<\/a> calling it \u201cfaithful enough to the original to please traditionalists and tweaked enough to feel somewhat fresh.\u201d Prior to this month, the Lilo & Stitch property had already become one of Disney\u2019s top 10 best-selling franchises ever, bringing in a reported $2.6 billion in merchandise last year.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tSydney Agudong as Nani, Maia Kealoha as Lilo and Stitch in Lilo & Stitch.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy of Disney<\/p>\n

\n\tAccording to Delia Konzett, a professor at the University of New Hampshire who wrote about the original film in her book Hollywood\u2019s Hawaii, the animated Lilo & Stitch can be commended for putting a Hawaiian family at the center of the story and featuring a Hawaiian love interest for Nani. However, she also notes elements of its narrative that rely on stereotypes, including Elvis Presley as the sound of Hawaii or the CIA agent becoming a friendly representative of the government and thus diminishing the distrust that real-life Hawaiians can feel toward U.S. authorities\u2019 presence in managing the islands.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe concept of \u2018ohana\u2019 as an extended family embracing the entire community would contradict Nani giving up Lilo to the state, since \u2018ohana\u2019 stresses the community\u2019s self-regulation not requiring any government intervention,\u201d Konzett tells THR. She adds, \u201cUnlike mainland audiences, Hawaiian audiences are torn about the commodification of Hawaii in terms of tourism serving as a continuing playground for exoticized Pacific fantasies.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tFor his part, Fleischer Camp has said<\/a> that he felt the original movie made Nani \u201ca little too rose-colored-glasses,\u201d given all that she dealt with at a young age. On Tuesday, the director reposted<\/a> social media praise from a fan who called the remake\u2019s ending \u201cmore realistic\u201d and talked about her own experience as a teen mom. Fleischer Camp added, \u201cIt seems like the people with actual lived experiences like this are the ones with whom this ending resonates the most.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThrough the years, Hollywood projects set on Hawaii have been subject to criticism over a lack of local representation, including the use of brownface in the 1970 Charlton Heston movie The Hawaiians and, more recently, the casting of Emma Stone as a character of Chinese and Hawaiian descent in 2015\u2019s Aloha. Although some social media posts criticize actress Agudong as being more light-skinned than Nani was depicted in the animated film, individuals who spoke to THR emphasize that the casting feels reflective of the Hawaiian populace. However, one recent Hawaii-set project that was dinged for featuring white actors in the lead roles was the first season of HBO\u2019s hit series The White Lotus<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt\u2019s a very colonial telling of Hawaii,\u201d Rigg says of the HBO\u2019s show first season. \u201cThe original Lilo & Stitch opens interesting dialogues about how the labor of Hawaiian people is commodified and also limited in terms of the opportunities that Hawaiian employees are allowed, simply due to systemic inequalities and access to education. But it centered those Hawaiian characters. On The White Lotus, everyone who\u2019s Hawaiian is either a peripheral character or erased from the narrative.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tDisney\u2019s presence on Hawaii includes Aulani, a beachside resort that opened in 2011 and features Stitch as one of the characters making poolside visits to guests. Konzett notes that the hotel provides jobs for Hawaiians but calls it \u201ca part of the ever-expanding tourist entertainment complex that turns the islands into a theme park experience rather than a genuine cultural encounter. I\u2019m sure that Disney\u2019s\u00a0Lilo & Stitch\u00a0promotes in concert with the Disney resort the overall Disney franchise, more so than any deep involvement with Hawaii.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tHawaiian filmmaker James Sereno praises the new Lilo & Stitch for hiring Hawaiian writer Chris Kekaniokalani Bright to work on the script and has heard from locals who enjoy the remake. Sereno feels optimistic about such forthcoming Hawaiian-focused projects as Jason Momoa\u2019s Apple TV+ series Chief of War<\/a> and 20th Century\u2019s planned crime film<\/a> from Martin Scorsese and Dwayne Johnson. While acknowledging that there could be complicated feelings about a white director like Scorsese leading the project, Sereno is mostly focused on whether the story will be told in an authentic way.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThat is the hard part \u2014 but I think that\u2019s the hard part with anything,\u201d he says about debate over who gets to tell these stories. \u201cSo I don\u2019t think that\u2019s exclusive to Hawaii\u2019s stories. With Scorsese, he\u2019s a hero of mine. To see him tell this story from his perspective in that way, it can get to the screen. Do I think that\u2019s super authentic? I don\u2019t know. But you would hope that they mix [in local voices] and that they listen.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Disney\u2019s live-action version of Lilo & Stitch made quite the splash when it debuted to the biggest Memorial…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":146044,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3935],"tags":[32015,823,77,55667,3943,62835,2678,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-146043","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-animation","9":"tag-disney","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-lilo-and-stitch","12":"tag-movies","13":"tag-representation-in-hollywood","14":"tag-the-white-lotus","15":"tag-uk","16":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114600896328689355","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146043","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=146043"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146043\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/146044"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=146043"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=146043"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=146043"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}