THE WILD ROBOT has nothing on LILO & STITCH
At the risk of sounding like fundraising spam or a text from you ex… “Hi, it’s been a while since we talked…” Apologies for the LONG summer/ fall hiatus. I had a wild, fulfilling, and very stressful few months! But didn’t we all. If you want to “skip recap” you can hop on down to mid post where I’ll talk about THE WILD ROBOT vs. director Chris Sanders’s earlier work LILO AND SITCH and how you should probably skip the former and just rewatch it’s 22 year old predecessor on loop.
If you’re interested in the RECAP - my hiatus included writing on a network animated comedy which was kind of a miracle given the scarcity of TV writing gigs. It was great to be back in a writers room and I met some lovely people. The hour commute did push me to the edge of sanity but we had some great music come out this summer that made the drive a lot more bearable.
My other creative project was a lot closer to home. I directed and produced A Midsummer Night’s Dream on my front porch! I’ll write a longer post about this but it was the most heart warming, exciting and fulfilling project I’ve done in a long time. 18 friends (eighteen!!) signed on to rehearse a 400 year old play and performed for our friends and family on a warm weekend in August. It’ll never be on my IMDB page, I can’t add it to a CV for any fellowships or grants, but it was a great reminder that art builds community and can feed us in ways that have nothing to do with career advancement.
PEAK SEASON also had it’s theatrical release and is available to rent on VOD! And on all Delta flights! We had a lovely LA premiere in September, including a Q&A that was foiled by a fire alarm because according to theater attendants, “someone tried to hotbox the bathroom.” tsk tsk. We also had a very cool Writers Guild screening and Q&A moderated by Variety writer Jenelle Riley. Theatrical screenings aside, I’m thrilled people are finding the film on their home and sky screens. Being on Delta flights feels like a wide screen release. Over 5,4000 flights a DAY. Even with that amount of airtime I’m still surprised so many people are taking a chance on an indie rom-com with no stars!
Okay end of recap. We’re deep into prestige movie season and it’s a VERY fun time. I’m loving the internet’s reception of CONCLAVE. Cardinal Lawerence is that. girl. He’s popular, he’s jealous, he’s paranoid and insecure, but also just wants do his job and be gud! Relatable. I don’t care if it’s soapy and unrealistic - I didn’t come for realism, I came for the hats and Isabella Rossellini.
My most recent Oscar-contender watch was THE WILD ROBOT. The story of a ship-wrecked robot who becomes foster mother to a gosling after inadvertently killing its family. Notable voices include Lupita Nyong’o and Pedro Pascal. Directed by seasoned animation director Chris Sanders (Lilo & Stitch, How To Train Your Dragon, The Croods) The film started strong - gorgeous animation, cute physical comedy, and a clear set up of technology in nature. I reclined my Alamo seat and prepared to let this charming tale whisk me away. But then the animals started talking. And the shallow characters, weird narrative structure, and forgettable score had me counting down the minutes until the unsatisfying ending.
Narratively this thing is a mess. It would have been enough to follow the robot’s motherhood journey. As she raises the gosling and prepares it for it’s first migration her relationship with the chick evolves from a task list to be completed (shelter, feed, fly) into a life affirming bond. Great. I can get behind a parable of parenthood. But there were 3-4 other themes that were apropos of nothing and only served to muddy the already thin storyline.
The most egregious of these was the “we all just need to work together” narrative that COMPLETELY undermines the “animals be wild” set up. One of the most interesting things about the first 10 minutes of the film is that death and violence are taken in stride. A possum family loses a sibling and flippantly does a recount “6… whoops, 5 kids”. A bird is beheaded and a main character tosses it over their shoulder like a continental soldier. It’s very laissez-faire and I was into it! I thought, “Oh this will be about how death is much more prevalent in nature than the safe and sterile world humans have created.” But the film didn’t go any deeper about loss, grief, or the human need to moralize violence. Instead it set up that animals do kill each other and have natural enemies and then completely disregards that in a WILDY unearned “we just gotta work together” third act.
The film’s biggest crime is that it’s just not funny. You dare cast Pedro Pascal as a sly fox and make him unfunny? Jail for everyone.
Chris Sanders is the writer/director of two other fantastic children’s classics. HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON and LILO & STITCH. The unifying factor being that Dean Deblois co-wrote and co-directed both. Dean went on to direct and write the HTTYD sequels, and Chris went on to write and direct THE CROODS and CALL OF THE WILD. Considering how off the rails WILD ROBOT is, I wonder if Dean was the special sauce that made DRAGON and STITCH so fun. Or maybe they got lucky with teams that let them do their thing on those films and WILD ROBOT was noted and rewritten to death?? I don’t know. But it’s just so far and away from those other funny, emotional classics.
I rewatched LILO & STITCH directly after THE WILD ROBOT. Truly within a hour of leaving the theater I’d cued up the Disney classic. I hadn’t seen it in 10+ years and I wondered how it would hold up. Well... It’s incredible. And shares a lot of the same themes as THE WILD ROBOT. Both feature a creature who is “programed” to disrupt connection. Roz the robot is programed to be objective task master who can’t form attachments. Stitch the alien is a chaos monster who sabotages any potential relationship. Both films portray the difficulties of parenting. Robot Roz has to raise a chick despite having no maternal instinct, and older sister Nani has to raise her sibling after the death of their parents. But Nani is human, and delightfully so. She’s driven to the edge of sanity by her little sister and her parenting struggles are relatable and heartbreaking. She’s just as unequipped for parenthood as Roz, but Nani’s stakes couldn’t be higher. If she fails her sister, Lilo goes into foster care. If Roz fails… well we’ve already watched several animals die without much fanfare so what’s one more dead bird?
The difference in stakes and emotionality between the two films is just night and day. I can’t believe how much more LILO & STITCH accomplished in 20 minutes than THE WILD ROBOT did in 40. And I’m not even getting into the gorgeous specificity of the Hawaiian setting and sweet Elvis soundtrack. I have no idea where THE WILD ROBOT took place. Maybe an island in British Columbia. In the future I guess. I have no idea who did the music. Also L&S features very funny secondary characters. Pedro Pascal WISHES he got to play Cobra Bubbles or Pleakley.
This is sadly not an episode of “What Went Wrong1” so I haven’t done the research into why L&S dunks so hard on TWR despite having the same writer/ director. STITCH did have almost double the budget of ROBOT. They had 80 million in 2002 money which is really 140 million, and ROBOT had 78 million in 2024 money. So maybe that Disney cash went to a much longer storyboarding process. Or to the Elvis songs. Money well spent IMO. A live action LILO & STITCH is coming summer 2025, but it will likely follow the Disney live action pattern of turning very funny animated films into humorless dramas. Considering the writer’s only other credit is a short about a “California nurse… trying to save an elderly Japanese couple in hiding” during the 1942 Japanese internment, I think it’s safe to assume the live action STITCH won’t be a side splitter. However it is directed by Dean Fleischer Camp, of MARCEL THE SHELL WITH SHOES ON, which was a beautiful film. If STITCH has a bit of that magic I can maaaybe be convinced to contribute to the box office. As if they need my help- these remakes print money!
Highly recommend this episode on another Disney classic, THE EMPEROR’S NEW GROOVE.