The best line in Lilo and Stitch is, “No! Don’t touch that! It’s from my blue period!”
Like not only is Lilo familiar with goddamn Picasso despite being maybe 8, but she’s made enough serious art of her own that she can divide it into similar periods.
Lilo is a goddamn prodigy. She is an eccentric genius on par with Tesla or Van Gogh.
Like those pictures she took were both dismissals of beauty standards (she mostly photographed fat people who were not conventionally attractive and she referred to them in awe as beautiful) and subversions of the dehumanization tourists subjected her to as a native Hawaiian (she photographed tourists like they were simply part of the landscape, just as they did to her).
“We can rebuild her… We have the technology… We know the way!”
A few months ago I ripped apart a Moana doll and made it into a stop-motion puppet using a kinetic armature kit.
The walk cycle above was the first thing I animated with this puppet, and was just a throw-away practice test with no green screen. I had never done a walk cycle in stop-motion before and soon discovered how difficult animating a straight-ahead cycle within a localized space with no retakes could be.
I showed the cycle to my dad while he was holding my Moana puppet in his hand and he seemed more impressed with this crappy test than the actual animation I did on the movie! I think the combination of him holding the puppet, and then seeing it come to life on the video before him was what blew him away. I guess that’s the appeal and magic of stop-motion. 🙂
Here’s a second test I animated for fun:
I read that it’s best to have the foot joints nice and tight to hold the weight of the puppet, and have the arms looser. It’s amazing how much weight those toe and foot ball-joints could hold for the falling poses:
Let’s not credit just Chris Sanders for this. This happened because they cast actual Hawaiian Actors like Tia Carrere and Jason Scott Lee to play Hawaiian characters, and allowed the actors to have input into writing the characters’ lines.
This sort of authenticity comes from accuracy and authenticity in casting choices. The fact that Chris Sanders as direct/writer facilitated that does not mean he gets credit for the actors’ experience.
This is why diversity and representation in media matters.
Dude as a hawaiian, this is like straight up what my life as a kid was. My mom worked at those fakey luaus full time to pay rent. My mom is someone who is absolutely passionate and proud about being a hawaiian, living and teaching the ways our ancestors lived and taught.
See, we Hawaiians, we live by the way of aloha. And not by the way of “hello” “goodbye”, let me educate you. As Pono Shim, CEO and President of Enterprise Honolulu, the Oahu Economic Development Board, states absolutely perfectly “aloha is to be in the presence of life, to share the essence of one’s being with openness, honesty, and humility. It is a way of being, a way of behaving, a way of life. It is a commitment to accepting others and giving dignity to who they are and what they have to offer.” Aloha is more than hello and goodbye. Think of aloha as an abbreviation.
Akahai: meaning kindness
Lokahi: meaning unity
Olu’Olu’: meaning agreeableness
Ha’aha’a: meaning humility
Ahonui: meaning patience
This is something we all need to live by, seriously, we all should
the dropped sub-plot was that lilo hated tourists, which is why she goes around taking pictures of them like they were attractions instead of people; like how they took photos of locals
similarly there was a deleted scene where she scares tourists off of a beach by sounding a false tsunami siren to watch them run screaming
deeper in the lore that kid thats a prick to her, mertyle, is the daughter of the person who runs the megamart and crushed a lot of other local businesses- when they have to do a hula to tell a story mertyle actually uses it to describe the low prices, where lilo does a hula about a traditional creation myth that was important to her mother. you may notice both lilo and nani are on first name basis with both the coffee shop owner and the fruitseller, there is big disparity between the locals and foreign interest businesses relegating them to just be tourist industry
friendly reminder that lilo & stitch is indisputably the best disney film
And it used all this as the backdrop to a story about the truest love ever: two sisters who don’t entirely understand each other, but do their best, and how they embraced someone else who was othered.
Like there is nothing about this movie that isn’t pure gold.
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