The beloved Disney movie made in a secret hangar that almost brought hand-drawn animation back.
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This article originally ran on October 19, 2022. you’re able to listen to ithere, and follow the entire series at theDisney Dilemmahub.
Visually, the film is a wonder.
Yes, theres a demonic agent of chaos with six limbs and a mouthful of huge teeth.
Yes, Ving Rhames shows up voicing a riff on hisPulp Fictioncharacter.
This film is the strangest and most delicate of combinations.
It remains, to this day, one of Disneys most beloved films.
I. I think these have gotten too big.
Jeffrey Katzenberg departed in 1994.
Joining him was Dean DeBlois, who had worked closely with Sanders as co-head of story onMulan.
About 21 people attended, including Roy and Patty Disney, Peter Schneider, and me.
We picked apples, we carved pumpkins, and we talked about animation.
It was a bit of a monster with no real explanation as to where it came from.
It was all about how he found a way to belong.
So I abandoned it.
Schumacher:Chris was extraordinary.
Chris created amazing things.
He did I Cant Wait to be King.
He created the crane game forToy Story.
That Calvinist thing: I have been chosen.
So I went to Chris and said, Everybody wants this next film to be you.
Sanders:Thats when I pitched the film for the very first time.
It was all set in the forest with animals.
An alien among animals is not as remarkable as an alien among humans.
Also, I said, The forest is just green on green on green.
I said, Visually, imagine color.
I initially suggested Tahiti.
Ive always wanted to go because my great-grandmother was born in Tahiti.
Sanders:I had a map of Hawaii up on my wall.
Id been on vacation there.
I drew Stitch and I tried to build a model of him.
It was this conglomerate of different animals.
I had some pieces of crab that I had bought at a seafood place.
I made a clay head.
I found some glass eyes at the taxidermy shop.
I brought that back from Palm Springs and gave it to Tom and the development department.
Thats when Tom bounced back and said, Ill do it if its inyourstyle.
Florida was mostly a satellite studio at that point.
Sanders:I knew that that was the right place.
It was out of sight, out of mind.
Sanders:I remember going to theHerculeswrap party, which was gigantic.
I ran into Michael Eisner.
I like Michael a lot, but we dont have a lot in common.
Hes super-nice and a fascinating person, but hes really into hockey and I dont know anything about hockey.
I think these have gotten too big.
He was echoing something that I was feeling.
Things had gotten bigger and bigger and bigger.
But the bigger they got, the more unwieldy.
The pains associated with corporate meddling understandably made writers, animators, and directors nervous.
Nothing good ever happened in that room, he says.
I boarded this huge sequence where these cats were battling each other.
All of a sudden, I was on Disneys corporate jet.
As it turned out, Leonard Bernstein didnt show up for the meeting.
But you could tell it wasnt going well.
Like,Oh, I think we may have made a mistake by coming here.
Schumacher:There was another moment that probably informed Chris.
She hands him all this stuff, and he throws it on the ground.
It makes me cry every time I watch it.
Im actually tearing up telling you the damn anecdote.
We screened it in New York for Michael Eisner.
AndMulandidnt nudge Michael at all.
At the end, he literally screamed, Whos the guy on the bench?!
Chris was sort of jumpy about Michaels notes after that.
Sanders:I happened to sit right behind Michael Eisner at aLion Kingscreening.
Hed had a very difficult morning.
Wed heard about it before: Hes had some bad meetings.
I was waiting for Michael to write stuff down.
But I think he was just consumed with what had happened earlier in the day.
He kept doing that through the film.
Simba says, I see nothing.
You are the one true king,and Michael looks down the entire time.
Mufasa says, Remember who you are.
I couldnt stand up and go, He missed it!
He didnt see it!
Jeffrey Katzenberg says, Well, Mufasas ghost came back for him.
Michael goes, Oh, I didnt get that at all.
Jeffreys like, How could you miss that?
Michaels like, I dont know.
I just didnt see that.
Thats the kind of thing thatLilo & Stitchnever went through.
Hed say, So what is this wholeLilo & Stitchthing?
And Tom would say, Oh, its this thing that were doing.
Its not really ready yet, but when its ready well show you.
Schumacher:WhenDumbowas made, Walt was in South America.
He would just come in, give a note, leave.
Clark Spencer (producer):Tom really knew the right moments to bring people in.
On our original series, we were in Toronto, and HBO very rarely flew up to see us.
Lorne Michaels only made the flight once a year.
That was mostly to see his family because hes from Toronto.
So we were hidden like that, too.
And thats another reason that Florida was magic, because no one knew what was going on in Florida.
Lisa Poole (associate producer):Being in Florida, you were away from the mothership.
If you needed support from L.A., you had to holler a little louder.
But that gave us freedom.
There were definitely some things we did differently.
We have no business telling a Hawaiian story.
Being out on an island, theres no smog.
The greens were greener, the fuchsias were more fuchsia, the skies were bluer.
Being an art director and working in cities and stuff like that, Ive never seen color like that.
You have to go on-site and paint the actual things so you come back with the actual colors.
They were collecting stuff that became the vibe of the film and making very careful observations architecturally.
What the curves look like, what the window frames look like.
Sluiter:The sand is very iron rich.
One day we were sitting on the beach at night having dinner by the ocean.
The sun was setting and the waves were coming in.
The water was turquoise, but the sea foam was pink.
Youll see in the surfing scene, we did that.
Most people wouldve just done the water with white foam or grayish blue foam.
We made it pink because thats what we saw.
So we did that.
We had a tour guide, and he took us in the bus down to a school.
He said, The schools are a little bit protective here.
They dont like mainlanders to come in and snoop.
I cant guarantee that theyll let you in.
I remember we knocked at the door and a teacher came out.
This little girl who just heard Disney, she said, Did you work onThe Little Mermaid?
I said, Yeah, I drew her father, and she went, Yay!
Then they really warmed up to us.
I took a sketchbook with me and drew a little.
How fidgety they are in school girls that age.
This girl came by and sat down.
She was really pissed off.
I remember she had a ukulele.
I think she had just quit her job, and she was stewing about it.
Dean and I had a short conversation with her.
She was really the right age and the right attitude.
She had kind of an aggressive edge to her.
We both realized Nani is that character.
So we took a lesson from that and tried to add that energy to Nani.
Sanders:Dean and I have no business telling a Hawaiian story.
you could tell stories like that, but then you find people who do have a business there.
So we reached out to as many people as we could that lived there.
A great actor, who is right for the role, will change the course of the film.
But because she was literally one of the very first voices, it was very difficult to say yes.
You just dont expect the first voice you hear to be the right one.
So we kept reading and reading and reading.
At one point, Calista Flockhart came in to audition for the part of Nani.
She looked at the pages and asked, How old is this girl?
We said, Well, shes 19, 20.
She said, Because she doesnt seem like shes 19.
Shes acting like a mom.
In her audition, she pushed it younger.
A little bit less responsible.
But the more people we read, the more we just always came back to Tia Carrere.
She did a brilliant job acting all the bits.
The quality of her voice fit so beautifully with this character.
What do you think about the story?
I said, Well, how do you feel about Pidgin?
Its such a particular cadence of speech.
Chris and Dean said, How do you want to infuse it into the character?
I said, Well, I wouldnt want it to be too strong where the viewer cant understand.
Just a bit of Pidgin, to infuse that character with authenticity.
I was so happy that they were open to that.
Sanders:We met Tia at a restaurant in Pasadena called Twin Palms.
We said, No, we have somebody else joining us, and he was completely annoyed by that.
He went away and we kept waiting and waiting.
Then somebody said, Oh, shes here.
Dean and I went out to meet her, and it was this limousine.
The driver got out and said, Are you here for Ms. Carrere?
Dean and I said, Yes!
He said, Are youready?
We were like, Yes?
He opened the door.
She was dressed in this amazing, spray-painted-on black leather outfit.
I cant even describe it.
The whole place came to a stop.
The guy who treated us so badly comes back and goes, Oh, oh, hello.
I was like, Yes, our third … our third has arrived.
Tia had read the script.
One of our difficult moments was when Nani tells Lilo that theyre going to be separated.
We had difficulty trying to come up with the words.
It was one of Tia Carreres suggestions that she sing Lilo that song.
It was a beautiful, honest, very sincere moment.
Carrere:I think Chris asked me, How would you say good-bye in Hawaiian?
They said, Can you sing for us?
And theyre like, Oh my gosh, thats perfect.
(Kelly Slater was doing some talks on the surfing scenes.)
The director said, Hey, can you sing Aloha Oe?
I said, Can my grandma sing harmony with me?
We sat under a banyan tree in Hawaii and she sang the harmony.
Much later, on her deathbed in the hospital, it was one of the last things we did.
I sang Aloha Oe with her, and she was harmonizing with me.
My cousin played the ukulele.
Thats so deep for me.
Sanders:I believe that characters tend to avoid things.
Because I do it in my own life.
That worked beautifully for the film.
A great actor, who is right for the role, will change the course of the film.
Im like, Oh, youstupid head.
Its like such a Hawaii thing.
And when I say to Lilo, Oh, Lilo, youlolo.
These are turns of phrase that we would use in Hawaii when I was growing up.
Jason Scott Lee (voice of David Kawena):Tia brought me into the picture.
She was cast first, and so she made the suggestion to let me be a part of it.
Jason could do in just a few words what we were probably overwriting.
So Id do that.
Theyd go, Oh, thats great.
They liked the cadence its a very specific singsong key in of rhythm.
It was that back and forth.
I think theres one line that stands out that was a very kind of a local thing.
When theyre talking about Stitch, David says, You sure its a dog?
Thats a very Pidgin English kind of thing.
DeBlois:The most difficult role to cast was Lilo.
We auditioned so many girls.
Sanders:We had gone all over the place.
We had had searches in Hawaii.
We wanted a Hawaiian voice.
We couldnt find one.
Kids are hard because, in a sense, you want a kid whos not an actor.
DeBlois:It wasnt untilDaveigh Chasewalked in with this haunted quality and this really dry demeanor.
But then she would explode on-camera when she would do the lines.
She could alternate between sort of haunted and glum and over-the-top excited about things.
Deja:Daveigh ChasewasLilo.
Whether she was like Lilo in real life or not, I dont know.
But she had this sort of matter-of-fact quality.
Im like,Oh my God.
She had an adorable little voice.
She had that sassy little-kid thing.
Sanders:We had made the decision to not cast Stitch.
He was never intended to speak.
He was going to be the equivalent of Dumbo.
He would make noises, but he would never verbalize anything.
He would leave me really upsetting voice messages in that voice.
I said, Just do that voice.
DeBlois:But it just never happened.
Eventually the pictures married so well with the voice that Chris became the official voice of Stitch.
I was in one cartoon, and it made me think cartoons were horrible.
It was about a dog or something.
So I thought, Oh, well, I gave cartoons a try.
Then I had another horrible experience.
Do you remember the Tom Kenny showCatDog?
I was going to be … What was he?
I was going to be Cat.
The will do guy.
Will do, slipped my mind.
But Nickelodeon wanted me to do it high energy!
Maybe Marlon Brando would be able to do low-key with high energy.
Im not Marlon Brando.
So I thought cartoons were done.
Then they asked me to audition forLilo & Stitch.
I was not familiar.
They said, Well have him come in.
He came in, and suddenly there was the character.
McDonald:Dean was a Canadian.
There are so many Canadians in animation.
Do you think I said that?
The audition went okay.
Then they called me back and I did the same thing.
Then they called me back again.
I think I had five callbacks.
I didnt find out until a few years after the cartoon premiered that they really fought for me.
Disney didnt know who I was.
That was really the beginning of it for me.
Now Ive done10 million cartoons.
Sanders:You write enough to frame up a character, but the frame is empty.
And then somebody like Kevin McDonald is suddenly in the frame, and now everythings going to change.
McDonald:I know my instincts are always just to go for the comedy.
It was definitely a comedic character, but I probably pushed it more that way.
Because its impossible to do anything else with me.
Not that Im so good at comedy, but all Iamis comedy.
I think they were going for a Laurel and Hardy thing with Pleakley and Jumba.
We were definitely the comedy stooges.
Of course,David Ogden Stiersgot the more dramatic stuff to do.
It was the oddest friendship ever.
I actually didnt meet him until the premiere!
And then we did the TV show together.
He could have been a librarian or worked at the DMV.
We actually approached Jeff Goldblum at one point for the voice.
It was great to meet him, and he was such a character, but he eventually declined it.
That was a moment where we went away and said, Is this really the character that we want?
Is he interesting enough?
So we had the idea of just going the opposite direction.
DeBlois:We thought,No, hes got to be intimidating.
He really has to put the fear of God into them.
We just had the audacity to approach him.
We were both really nervous to meet him.
Both Dean and I were like, Oh, okay, and we ran to get into position.
Then at one point, he stopped and he said, Who wrote this?
Dean and I are both like, Oh, well, he did.
We actuallypointed to each other.
There was a pause, and he goes, Because its good.
He was no-nonsense, and worked like crazy, and was so good.
He would direct the line at you.
V. You dont mess with hula.
As in almost all Disney movies, music would play a hugely important role inLilo & Stitch.
Sanders:You dont mess with hula.
You know, some people treat hula as this sort of silly thing.Gilligans Island.
What we learned very quickly from everybody we were consulting with is you dont do that.
Its very much a special and very particular art form.
DeBlois:To Chris and I, music is half of the equation.
It does all the heavy lifting emotionally.
Top of our list was Alan Silvestri.
Alan is so curious that he started scouring everything he could find on traditional Hawaiian music.
Its a very cared-for tradition from Hawaii.
The African-music section was huge, tons of CDs, but like two in the Hawaiian part.
We wanted to orchestrate this music.
We wanted to take these Hawaiian themes and make them movie scale.
And thats a bit of a no-no.
Silvestri:He had a storefront in some shopping area, like many churches do now.
Thats where his students would congregate, meet and do their work together.
We sat there, and Mark was a real force.
He was a very powerful man.
But to others, he was bringing old Hawaiian music to a new generation.
Silvestri:It was a very interesting courtship because Mark was very guarded, as he should have been.
He didnt want a bunch of commercial knuckleheads walking on the sacred ground with their nonsense.
It took us a while to win him over.
Lee:The Hawaiian community is very sensitive about outsiders coming in and protecting their culture.
Spencer:We needed a childrens choir to sing in the opening song.
We went to record with the Kamehameha School.
So we fly to Hawaii, were in Honolulu.
We have not heard the kids sing.
We know theyve been practicing.
Lynell Bright (music teacher at Kamehameha Schools):We learned one song, He Mele No Lilo.
We were supposed to record it in May, and then it got pushed back to October.
Then, after September 11th, it got pushed back to December.
By then they decided to do a second song, Hawaiian Rollercoaster Ride.
You just got so emotional.
And you cant imagine that it would get more emotional, but it does.
We go to record them, and theres no huge recording studio in Honolulu.
Were in a very tight space where only the kids can fit.
So all the parents are outside the studio.
So they come in, and … everyone was crying.
Every 15 or 20 people who came in crying.
That was really phenomenal to watch.
We just take for granted some of those things.
Bright:I think Mark Hoomalus nephew was in the choir.
And he came to a concert at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, where we sang.
So I think he brought up the idea.
Back then, we used to always sing a Disney medley.
Whatever the latest Disney movie was, that would be one of the songs wed perform.
That particular year, Im pretty sure the Disney release wasDinosaur.
We were like,Oh, theres no music in this movie!
Then I got a phone call.
Hey, Disneys going do a movie.
Would you want to be a part of this?
Im just like, What?
Thats a dream come true!
John Sanford (artistic supervisor for story):Chris always was a huge Elvis fan.
We figured at some point someone was going to pull us aside and say, You cant do that.
So strangely we found ourselves having a premiere at Graceland.
But I pointed at one box and I said, Whats that?
Because it said Toiletries.
And there was a bottle of Hai Karate cologne.
Schumacher:Were you old enough to know what Hai Karate was?
Hai Karate was an aftershave that everyones gym teacher wore after they gave up Old Spice.
I said, Can I smell it?
She goes, you’re able to sniff it, not spray it.
So I take it its half-filled and we all sniff it.
It smelled just like our PE teachers.
It was Hai Karate.
They would sell it, Hai Karate, with a white guy in a gi.
Anyway, people my age were raised with a lot of influences that arent really great.
Nobodys done this since the 1940s.
Dean and I both said, Yes, lets do that!
What I found out later is that Ric Sluiter greatly regretted having said that!
Ric went back to his hotel room that night and produced a couple of paintings.
Ric came back and said, Heres the thing: Watercolor is going to be really difficult.
Nobodys done this since the 1940s.
Nobody even knows what kind of pigments or kind of papers all those things are gone.
They would have to be rediscovered.
Also, you have to be like a painting ninja to handle watercolor.
DeBlois:Its a very unforgiving medium because you cant really cover over your mistakes.
If you make a mistake on a watercolor painting, its ruined.
You have to go back to the beginning.
DeBlois:That whole team of artists in Florida in the background department were such avid painters.
They went back and did research and experimented with pigment, types of watercolor, paper.
I think they were really excited about the challenge.
I have to give him a lot of credit there.
He taught me a lot.
That really pissed me off.
Sluiter:Maurice Noble was one of my heroes, and he was in his 80s.
He used to work for Disney in the 40s and 50s.
He could hardly see.
I asked, Howd you get this texture?
He said, The secret is sea salt very coarse-grain sea salt.
So all the lava rocks inLilo & Stitch it was all sea salt.
It came right from Maurice Noble.
DeBlois:you could see all the telltale signs of an artists hand moving across the picture planes.
We didnt want to let anybody down.
We had things to prove.
Lilo & Stitchwas based primarily on one artists aesthetic sensibilities.
That made it unique among Disney productions; it meant that the characters didnt look like typical skinny-waisted princesses.
It was all Chriss aesthetic sense.
She came back with a multipage book calledSurfing the Sanders Stylethat explained why I draw like I draw.
No one was more interested to read this than I was!
This book became a primer for anybody who was coming onto the film.
Can you pose because I want to draw your legs on Nani?
Everyone struggled with that.
Women had to have this unrealistic body jot down.
The same thing would have happened to Nani, and the movie would look like every other Disney movie.
Betta:We had things to prove.
We were always compared to the other studio.
We were seen as the not-so-cool younger brother.
Florida yokels versus the elite Hollywood movie-star kind of group.
DeBlois:When we arrived in Florida, we knew these people because we had worked onMulanwith them.
That was a difficult film to finish.
There were lots of divorces and ailments that came out of that process.
So we made a decision.
We sat down with the entire crew when we got there.
We said, Okay, heres the deal.
We have a lot less money.
We have less time.
Everybody gets a weekend.
Well figure out how to make this and be happy doing it.
That became the spirit of making the film.
Ric Sluiter would take us out on weekends and we would go scalloping or shrimping late at night.
Dropping lights into the water and catching shrimp.
Sluiter:Mulanwas five years of hell.Lilo & Stitchwas two years of bliss.
Everything went so smooth.
So basically once they knew that the style was there, they just left me alone.
Sanders:Dean and I found our comfort zone innottelling animators what to do.
Were not going to get into a thing where, I kind of saw it more like this.
Now youre in a situation where some poor animator is like, So you want him to do what?
Theyre suddenly like somebody taking an order instead of doing what they do best.
What if we made our villain the hero?
Lilo & Stitchdidnt have the kind of large story team that would have been common on a Disney production.
Very often, major story alterations could happen relatively quickly with input from just one or two people.
Oh, what if he blew up in a fireworks stand?
That led me to think,What if we actually redeemed a villain?
Its a redemption story where the villain and hero are the very same character.
I always describe it as a spiral.
Hes telling the story about this alien.
Then this alien meets this little girl.
Okay, well, this little girl needs a family, so theres a big sister.
These characters just develop, and then somebody is chasing him.
Where did this alien come from?
Well, theres this Galactic Federation.
Then all those characters start filling in.
It will reject things that feel unnecessary or forced upon it.
But it will also ask for those moments that it needs.
Poole:I think Chris and Dean were a good balance for each other.
Sanders:Roy Disney prompted one of the biggest changes in the film.
At one meeting, he said, I liked Stitch when I thought he was a baby.
Its almost like hes a virus.
The room got really quiet.
I looked over at Tom, and Tom was looking at me and he didnt look away.
I said, The equivalent of a virus would be a genetic mutation.
If Stitch was a genetic mutation, then he can be the problem by himself.
We can eliminate all these other characters.
All these people didnt know, but their parts were cut.
By that point, we had already recorded Ricardo Montalban as one of the bad guys.
He was really nice, and Id persuaded him to do his voice fromWrath of Khan.
I didnt want to just come out and say it.
He kept doing all these different voices and was working so hard.
I finally basically said, Can you just do the voice you did inWrath of Khan?
He was like, Oh,YOU MEAN LIKE THIS?
And he did it!
Sanford:Early on, Chris and I drove down to Laguna Beach.
He really was adamant that Stitch did not have to go back to space.
He wanted Stitch to find a home with his little girl and her sister.
He said, I cant figure out how to justify that they stay.
The grand councilwoman is going to take him back.
I said, Wait a minute.
When Lilo adopted Stitch, she had to pay money, right?
He said, Yeah.
I said, Well, shes got a receipt.
If the grand councilwoman takes him away, thats stealing.
So thats where that scene at the end came from, where Lilo just holds up the receipt.
Sanders:We had an internal screening in California.
Sometimes big, giant, obvious things, you miss them because youre so busy attending to other things.
Then we realized, Oh, Ohana has to be the thing that changes him.
So we started putting it into the film much more overtly.
Stitch was still dangerously irresponsible.
He ends upstealing a 747from the airport and flying it in a chase with Captain Gantu through downtown Honolulu.
It was finished and in color.
And then 9/11 happened.
Schumacher:I was bicoastal in those days.
Everyone was going to fly home on Tuesday.
And then 9/11 happens.
Twenty people end up in my tiny apartment on Central Park South.
Then my phone rings, and its Chris saying, Tom, what are we going to do?
And he said, No, no.
What are we going to do with the final chase in the movie?
Im like, Holy crap!
This scene went from being funny and outrageous to horrible and tragic and traumatizing.
I think the next day he called me and said, Heres what Im going to do.
Im going to wrap the 747.
Theyre going to take Jumbas ship.
DeBlois:We kept the sequence, but then downtown Honolulu skyscrapers became mountain canyons.
And the stolen 747 became the ship Jumba had originally arrived in.
Sanders:Poor guy with the ice-cream cone was going to be crossing the street in Honolulu.
Now hes in Kauai on the beach and gets his thing knocked off.
Oh my God, we made a film and we never told Michael Eisner.
Lilo & Stitchhad been produced quietly and for relatively little money in Florida.
But eventually, Disney leadership not to mention the public would need to see it.
The world of animation had changed dramatically over the years.
That madeLilo & Stitcha throwback of sorts.
And yet it was also thoroughly new.
And it would prove to be a hit.
It would also inspire three direct-to-video sequels as well as several TV series and video games.
Sanders:Michael Eisner didnt see it until it was done.
I really liked this.
I cant really explain it.
Ive never seen anything like it … but I like it.
Its just so hard to explain … but I really like it.
The marketing people asked, Well, how do we release this movie?
There was even a suggestion by a very important player that we do the commercial in CG.
I said, That seems a little dishonest.
The movie works because itsnotCG.
Because if it was fromHercules, it has a Gerald Scarfe spin on it.
They all look different.
Theres a sameness you might get into unless people really push the boundaries.
Having worked in both, this film was such a celebration of hand-drawn animation.
I kept being told by the publicists, Nobody cares about the watercolors.
I said, Were going to teach them what it is.
We went to the Cannes Film Festival to promote it.
Clark, Dean, Chris, me.
Roy and Patty flew us there on Air Roy, a private 737 they owned.
I think we put 500 journalists through a class where they got to learn how to watercolor paint.
Carrere:I just thought, This is so beautiful.
The houses are like the houses that I grew up around.
Shes not like Cinderella painted brown.
I love that Chris and Dean were cognizant of what they were putting in front of the world.
It was so ahead of its time on so many levels.
I think thats a thoroughly modern theme.
To think that we did that 20 years ago is kind of amazing.
On so many levels, I was so proud to be able to represent Hawaii.
McDonald:Ill tell you the truth.
It was better than I thought it was going to be.
Usually its a family.
Ive met 100 families like that.
Itll probably be the thing they say when I die.
It wont be Kids in the Hall, itll be Voice actor fromLilo & Stitch.
Oh God, I hope Dean doesnt read this.
But no, I definitely like it!
Its good, its good!
Still, two and a half stars.
I think people in Hawaii were excited that Disney was doing something about Hawaii.
But anytime, theres going to be positive and negative.
So I think there were some mixed reactions.
Lee:I was pleasantly surprised.
The whole thing about the older sister raising the younger sister thats real.
I mean, those stories still hold up.
You dont often see Disney animations like that.
Betta:I go to Disney all the time.
Little girls will walk around in Lilo costumes.
I walk right up to the parents.
I say, I worked on that film.
Thank you very much for allowing your daughter to get dressed up like Lilo.
Because it is so beautiful to me to see that 20 years later, kids are still wearing it.
Deja:I love it.
And thats not always the case.
You cant go back in and say, Can I have sequence 13, scene four back?
I just loved it.
Just like the whole audience, I laughed and cried and got really involved.
I thought,This is one of our best ones.
I insist that hadLilo & Stitchcome out right afterLion King, it wouldve made twice as much business.
So animation took a little bit of a downturn.Lilo & Stitchbrought it back up again.
Sanders:We were in the right place at the right time.
Tom Schumacher was there to protect this film.
So many people were in the right place at the right time who helped us out in Hawaii.
I just imagine how many times this could have gone wrong.
It almost makes me freak out now, just thinking about how many near misses this thing probably had.
It was like bowling a strike.
Schumacher:The two movies that I get asked about more than anything else areEmperors New GrooveandLilo & Stitch.
Those two movies, in their own moment, people were like, What are they doing?
I dont think anything I ever worked on wasmore painful thanEmperors New Groove.
ButLilo & Stitchlives in the hearts of many, many people.
Dont lose sight of what this movie is actually saying.
This film is so much about kindness and embracing the other.
I cannot watch the movie without tearing up.
When Stitch goes outside and says, Im lost.
How does anybody watch that and not tear up?
And her unconditional love for him.
The sacrifice, patience, the trying to understand anothers thinking?
How does he see it?
This is their family its broken, but its their family.
Bright:One of the kids in the choir said it the bestrecently.
He said, When we were kids, we thought it was a great Disney movie.
Heres this alien, and its just a fun movie.
It doesnt matter what size you are or how different it is, a family is special.
Now hes an adult and he looks at it a different way.
I said, Well, I would do a postscript to the film.
I would show their life after the film ends.
We added those two minutes, and I think it totally changed the film.
I think it just says, We can all make our own families.
For those of us who have had to do that, I think its legacy is: Its beautiful.
Sanders:One of my co-workers gave me probably the greatest compliment.
He said, Lilo & Stitchis the closest thing toa Miyazaki filmDisney Studios will ever make.
And then he took the risk of hiding it from the studio at large.
CODA: That beautiful dream was over in a heartbeat.
The success ofLilo & Stitchin 2002 was one of the Florida studios triumphs.
But it proved to be short-lived.
Sluiter:We were completely blindsided.
I remember the day it happened.
They said that David Stainton and Pam Coates are flying in.
It was a Friday.
I said, They are?
Oh, thats not good.
He said, No.
Theyre just coming to have ice cream with the crew.
I said, No, bad news comes on a Friday.
I dont know what it is, but its bad news.
We were working onA Few Good Ghosts.
Dolly Parton was starring in it.
Coats:I loved that studio.
These are my people.
I was the executive who had spent the most time in that studio.
Id flown out there initially and didTrail Mix-Upand thenMulan.
I loved those people.
I knew them by name.
It was crazy hard because you knew their families.
You had been at barbecues with their families.
They werent numbers on a piece of paper that says, Hey, weve expanded too quickly.
So I felt I had to stand in front of those people.
Sluiter:That was probably the saddest day in my life.
People fainted and they fell to the ground on their knees crying.
That beautiful dream was over in a heartbeat.
People got shingles, people got insomnia.
Everybody got sick afterward, physically sick.
You have to deal with this loss, and then youve got to find the next gig.
It happens so much in the movie industry.
Schumacher:I was in Florida a couple years ago, right before the pandemic broke out.
I was castingAladdinin Mexico, the play.
I said, Can I go see the old animation studio?
It just made me want to vomit, I was so heartbroken.
We were all young kids when we started.
We all grew up together, like a family.
There was this collaboration that went from top to bottom.
Sanders:As far as traditional animation, Florida was where it was at.
Sluiter:Its gone.
Will it come back?
I watchedKlaus, by Sergio Pablos.
But I dont know.
It might be gone.
It just takes so long to get to that level of expertise.
Most animators go through this same thing: You first get the character and youre just drawing the scenes.
Then youre on the movie for a year, year and a half, two years.
By the end, its like youre living the character.
It takes time to get to that level.
Unless they can put together a studio, youre not going to get that level again.
So as far as the hand-drawn stuff goes, yeah.
I dont know, man.
Might be gone for features.
Everybody just uses the same stuff over and over again.
Its this formula of animation.
I dont see the uniqueness anymore.
I look at live-action movies and youve got an actor, right?
And the actor can change his persona.
He can change his character.
He can laugh a certain way in one scene, he can put on an accent in another.
He can walk a different style.
A good actor will change himself.
But in animation, they seem to just grab a formulaic impression and plug it in.
Its a plug-and-play thing.
You know that saying, Death by mass destruction?
I used to say, Life bymathdestruction.
Youve got to kill the math.
You have to kill the math to make it feel alive.
