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OHANA: LILO AND STITCH
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BUY LILO AND STITCH 2: STITCH HAS A GLITCH NOW ! LOOK OUT IN 2006 FOR LEROY AND STITCH !
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I would like to dedicate this webpage to Chris Sanders, creator of the character Stitch. His original concept of an alien that bonds with a little girl named Lilo, simply dazzled me ! Disney's brilliance won my heart yet another time on my second favorite Disney Feature of all time. May the voice of this special character and conscience of Stitch live on inside of us, for the true heart lies within OHANA.
OHANA means family and family means no one gets left behind . . .or forgotten.
Contact:
SeraMary@aol.com
or:
Gldmdlst@aol.com
at any conveniencefor
anything you may need!
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Lilo and Stitch Fact Sheet
Directed by: Chris Sanders and Dean Deblois
Written by: Chris Sanders
Music by: Alan Silvestri (score), Elvis Presley (songs)
Production Started Date: August 5, 1999
Production End Date: pushed back from May 2001 to late Summer/Fall 2001 due to budget cuts
Release Date: June 21, 2002
Running Time: 80 minutes
Budget: $80 million plus $40 million in marketing costs
U.S. Opening Weekend: $35.8 million over 3,191 screens
Box Office: $145.66 million in the U.S., $257.4 million worldwide
Video Revenue: $207.6 million from DVD and VHS rentals and sales
CAST
Lilo... Daveigh Chase
Stitch... Chris Sanders
David Kawena... Jason Scott Lee
Nani (Lilo's sister)... Tia Carrere
Jumba (a bounty hunter)... David Ogden Stiers
Pleakley... Kevin McDonald
Cobra Bubbles... Ving Rhames
Grand Councilwomen... Zoe Caldwell
Captain Gantu... Kevin Richardson
STORY
Lilo is a sweet little, Elvis lovin' Hawaiian girl who's a quite peculiar: she has an off-beat take on life, and is a little obsessed about taking care of downtrodden animals. Each day,she feeds Pudge the fish a Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich before she goes off to hula dancing scool.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the galaxy, we meet career criminal Stitch. An incorrigible unrepentant felon, this six-armed alien stands before the galactic tribunal. Just as the judge is about to pronounce sentence, Stitch escapes.
Zooming through the stars in his cool 1950s-style spaceship (complete with fins), Stitch tries to elude the two bounty hunters who've been sent out to recapture him. David Ogden Stiers, voices Captain Evil Genius, Jumba to voice one bounty hunter and Mark McKinney from The Kids in the Hall also voices Pleakley . Hoping to ditch the cops, the six-armed con crash-lands on Earth.
Where on Earth? Hawaii. To be specific, near the beach on Waikiki.
Stitch's only hope for eluding capture is to blend in with the locals. However -due to his bug eyes and blue fur- there's no way that he'll pass for human. But then Stitch notices that -if he folds up one set of arms under his fur- he can sort of pass for a dog. A really ugly, weird looking dog with blue fur!
At least, that's what the Animal Control Officer thinks when he captures Stitch. So there he is -back behind bars, just days away from being put to sleep- when Lilo comes into the pound and decides to adopt the crazy looking canine.
Stitch initially is looking to escape as soon as Lilo springs him from the pound. But the little girl keeps the still-disguised-as-a-dog extraterrestrial on a pretty short leash.
Lilo, her older sister Nani, and a handsome surfboard dude -who is attracted to Nani all get caught up in a crazy adventure as the two alien bounty hunters land on Earth to retrieve Stitch. Would you be surprised to learn that through her innocent and trusting and idiosyncratic treatment of him, Stitch develops a heart?...
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-- INTERESTING FACTS
* Some production was done in Honolulu, Hawaii, but Lilo and Stitch was shot mainly at the Orlando Studios. Therefore, drawings could be seen very early on at Disney
World's animation studio, through MGM Studio's guided tour. A visitor revealed on September 20, 2000 that they include room furniture tik torches, and two sections labeled ;David';s surfboard'; and Gantu's (space) Ship.
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DIDJA KNOW . . .?
* The story was cooked up by one of Disney's top story guys, Chris Sanders, who created an illustrated story outline that everyone fell in love with. He first began thinking about a Stitch-like character nearly 17 years ago when he was just out of school.
* In the early stages of story development, Stitch landed in rural Kansas and interacted entirely with animals. Animation president Thomas Schumacher suggested that Stitch interact with people instead, while a well-timed Hawaiian vacation gave Sanders the idea to move the story from the barnyard to the beach.
* Rodger Allers who created Oliver and Company,
Beauty and the Beast' and Aladdin, then directed
The Lion King, before leaving the troubled The Emperor's New Groove for this project) was originally set to direct Lilo and Stitch. Chris Sanders, who created the original story, took over to helm the project along newcomer Dean Deblois (layout artist for 1990's The Nutcracker Prince starring Peter O'Toole).
* The filmmakers and artistic supervisors spent two weeks in Hawaii, mostly on the island of Kauai, studying scenery and local customs prior to making the film. But the most important element they took away with them, they say, was the concept of or the sense of family or unity Hawaiians share.
* Co-director Chris Sanders provides Stitch's voice, a sort of E.T. croak that he uses to annoy his fellow animators. Lilo partner Dean DeBlois Boston terrier Theodore, provided his slurps and snorts after snacking on peanut butter
* Look for Dumbo, star of the last Disney full-length animated movie before Lilo to feature only watercolor backgrounds (in 1941).
* Lilo was influenced by Japanese anime master Hayao Miyazaki (My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki's Delivery Service). Says DeBlois, He creates genuine relationships in the realm of fantasy Kiki's coffee house is a tribute.
* The Mulan Wok eatery is a nod to the Disney film that Sanders and Dean DeBlois worked on previously.
* The movie that Stitch watches on the television in the store window is 1958's Earth vs. the Spider.
* Andreas Deja (the animator of Gaston, Triton, Hercules, Scar and Jafar amongst other Disney characters) revealed early on that the film was going to be in a cartoony style, similar to the animation style of an old Disney animator named Freddie Moore. Andreas called it the best story he's seen since he's been at Disney!
* Lilo and Stitch is not a musical, though Disney has bought the rights to six Elvis songs, because Lilo likes to hula dance on the beach to Elvis music: Hound Dog, Devil in Disguise, Burning Love, I'm Coming Home, Stuck on You and Heartbreak Hotel. A traditional Hawaiian song that was written by Queen Liliuokalani, the last Hawaiian monarch, and entitled Aloha Oe, will be performed by Tia Carrere. Alan Silvestri completed the recording of the score in late November 2001.
* Disney has supposedly VERY high hopes for this movie. It has been the praise of Disney animators for a while, and they're saying this is the film that's going to bring back the animated feature in a BIG way.
* Art from Lilo and Stitch was unveiled in the Disney Animation building of the new Disney's California Adventure in January 2001. Stitch is said to look like a cute baby panda with fangs. One scene displayed shows a female alien with tentacles for hair and an alien with one eye and a gumdrop-shaped head talking about how to get Stitch back. They apparently are police agents. Someone asks why they can't blow up the Earth and the gumdrop alien replies that they can't because it is a nature preserve for the endangered mosquito (they are breeding them here). The scene continues with the two discussing who to send to get Stitch back before they decide on this big looking alien who we see in shadow behind bars.
* Animators have devised a new type of walk cycle for the alien ambassador who hires the alien bounty hunters because he has three legs.
* Stitch doesn't speak for most of the movie -the film is not told through snappy dialogue but rather through cleverly staged visual set pieces.
* Production on this project was supposed to wrap in May 2001, but due to budget cuts was reportedly only completed in late summer/fall 2001.
* Lilo & Stitch is the first animated feature in years from Walt Disney Studios that's based on an original story. The tale was crafted by noted storyboard artist Chris Sanders. He';s the genius who came up with the staging for many of your favorite moments in Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and The
Lion King. Chris made his directorial debut with Lilo & Stitch.
* Animator Andreas Deja recalled in a March 2003 interview that I was actually on The Emperor's New Groove. It started out being called Kingdom of the Sun. We had done a little work, and they realized that the story needed to be plussed, so it kind of started over again. During that time, I was on the floor where they have the development work for the features, and I saw these drawings that Chris Sanders had done of a little Hawaiian girl. She was holding a fish, and it immediately looked extremely appealing to me--the style and the situations. They found out that I was interested in the project so they said, 'Let's pitch you the whole story. So a week later they pitched me the outline and I just loved it because it was so different, so unusual and quirky, yet there was personality and heart. I thought that I really wanted to work on this. I was the first animator that jumped productions, because Kingdom was starting over and becoming Emperor's New Groove. I switched over to Lilo & Stitch and I did pretty much development work on all the characters, because Chris and Dean the directors wanted to see which character I would feel the closest to. After seeing sketches of Nani and Stitch and the social worker and David and all of them, they said, You know, there's something in these Lilo drawings that you connect with that character. So I was very happy to take over that assignment. Lilo became a really fun character--she is so unusual and yet real, in many ways like a real kid. I really had a chance to crawl into that little character and animate her from the inside-out--that's what I tried anyway, to really feel her pain and her loneliness and all of that.
* The workspace of animators working on this project in Orlando has been decorated in an island motif for inspiration. A big Aloha banner was placed at the entrance of the animation area, with tropical themed party like paper pineapples and leis in every cubicle. Some genuine Hawaiian artifacts like tiki totems and lamps were also scattered around the place.
* On Daveigh Chase(now Dakota Fanning on Stitch Has a Glitch), Dean DeBlois said that we probably listened to about 150 girls and we were looking for someone who got the comedy of Lilo, but more importantly, got the dark side of Lilo. We had written some pages specifically to bring out that side of Lilo because she is very isolated in her own world, emotionally and externally. Daveigh came in on her first try, without any coaching from us, and nailed it on her first audition. We just didn't have to tell her anything, but she knew from the character description she had read and she had a specific voice in her mind of the way she wanted to read it and it was exactly what we were looking to hear. She has this great sort-of haunting quality to her.
Producer Clark Spencer commented on the casting of Tia CarreraJason Scott Lee saying that we wanted to get some Hawaiian voices in the film because (the film) takes place in Hawaii. So Tia Carrera and Jason Scott Lee were two people we went after.They both brought a Hawaiian element and a local flavor to the film. Often times, when we got together to record, we'd ask them how would you say this in if you lived in Hawaii, and it would change. Plus, they both have really wonderful voices. It kind of surprised us with Tia because we didn't know she grew up in Hawaii and the only audio we had of her was her performance from Wayne's World and Eraser. In both cases, she played tough characters or screechy character and she didn't embody the warmth we wanted for the character, until she came in for the audition. And then she saw the material and started reading it with this warmth and sincerity that got us all excited about having found her.
* Disney switched from Kansas to Kaua for the setting of its upcoming movie thanks, in large part, to a Garden Island tour guide and the ohana spirit of the Islands that he emphasized while the writer-directors were visiting several years ago. Chris [Sanders, 40] had a map (of Hawai) on the wall when we were still working on the story, said Dean DeBlois, 31. Chris kept thinking that these small towns on Kaua he visited; they were perfect in size, with obvious beauty and had the spirit of ohana. Clark Spencer, 39, who is making his debut as producer with Lilo, adds that ohana was not part of the original script. On a research trip (in Hawai), everybody spoke of ohana. For Stitch and his transformation, what would be better than ohana? He comes to know what it means to have family. It struck a chord and really resonates in a wonderful way. It will be great for cultures outside of the USA who might not have heard about it. Sanders is forever grateful to a tour guide he refers to only as Francis, who knew everybody everywhere we went on Kauai, which made me realize what a tight-knit community Hawaii was. The idea was that there were broader implications of ohana that Stitch, the ultimate orphan with no parents, would come to be part of an ohana. We rewrote our entire film. DeBlois said that Stitch was all about being an isolated sort, from a broken family. The great thing about ohana is that family is not defined by parents or uncles. It can be a whole community, he said. "It works well with Stitch as part of a nonconventional family. It's an idea that's accepted, encouraged and celebrated.
* It originally was a story pitch, a children's book, continued Chris Sanders, of the screenplay he co-wrote and co-directed with Dean DeBlois. But when you talk about aliens, people get in their own minds a particular image; so we had to create illustrations as kind of a visual blueprint of where we would be going. In the original version, Stitch, a misfit dog resulting from a genetic experiment, originally was to crash-land from space into a forest, where he would be ostracized by woodland creatures and forced to live life on his own in rural Kansas. Inherent in animated stories is the fact that heroes and villains are usually black and white; heroes win, villains die, said Sanders of formulaic fantasy tales. But heroes are hard for normal people to aspire to they're too good. This film begins with the capture of a villain, the would-be hero; every character has good and bad qualities; the bad aspire to be good, but there are frailties. Because Sanders was an Elvis Presley fan, the movie incorporates The King's music. In creating Lilo's character, we have her as a devotee of records, gyrating to Elvis with an old-fashioned record player instead of CDs. Elvis is the soundtrack of her life
* A first trailor was made available in early July 2001.
* When Chris Sanders, the co-writer/co-director of Lilo & Stitch, originally pitched his story to Thomas Schumacher, president of Walt Disney Feature Animation, he did it with a 15-page illustrated book that he had created to tell the story and suggest the look of the film. Schumacher gave Sanders the go ahead on the project with one condition--the final film must remain true to Sanders' original illustrated treatment. Sanders' original drawings suggested a watercolor approach, and art director Ric Sluiter was quick to realize that the loose style of the medium would best capture the lush, organic, overgrown and luminous feeling of the Hawaiian Islands, the setting for the film. There was just one dilemna: watercolor backgrounds had not been used extensively in a Disney animated feature film in over six decades! The feeling in the animation community was that it was now impossible to make an entire animated feature film with watercolor backgrounds," said Sanders. The medium was commonly used in the early days at Disney on such films as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, Bambi and Dumbo, but background artists eventually turned to the more forgiving oil-based gouache as the preferred choice. Gouache backgrounds could be completed faster and could be fixed or altered if necessary, whereas watercolor backgrounds are far more unforgiving. Facing their challenge head on, the team did a test by creating two identical backgrounds--one using gouache and one with watercolors. The result was that using the lush, beautiful watercolor backgrounds suited the style of the film more than the gouache backgrounds. Working together, the background team experimented with watercolors and discovered new ways to make it practical and possible for the film. The final film contains over 1,200 amazing watercolor backgrounds, each a work of art in its own right. The saddest thing is that some of the backgrounds go by so quickly, notes Sanders. He added, "We couldn't have done this without the Florida background team. They are absolutely amazing. Near the end of the production they were creating watercolor backgrounds faster than they [used to] create gouache backgrounds." With Lilo & Stitch, the background team created incredible works of art, and rediscovered an almost lost animated art form along the way. As a tribute to the last animated films to use watercolor backgrounds, Dumbo makes a special appearance!
* Even though Internet reports claimed that the movie was originally set for a 2003 release, it was actually planned for Spring 2002. But because the movie was set in Hawaii, Disney executives thought it'd be a great summer movie and adjusted Treasure Planet around it by pushing it back to Christmas 2002, since Planet was experiencing production delays anyway.
* Art Director Ric Sluiter gave a presentation about the style of the film at the Official Disneyana Convention in September 2001. After spending a week in Hawaii, getting to know the locals and painting in both oil and water color, the production team discovered a few things they wanted to bring to the film: namely a bright color palette and the feeling of light. They chose to work in watercolor, since they wanted the film to have a softness, without hard edges or straight lines. Watercolor also does an interesting thing when laid down on white paper; it is a clear stain that lays on top of the paper so the white of the paper acts as a light source, giving the animators that push of color and light they observed in Hawaii. The trouble with watercolor though, is that it is very difficult to work with. And Feature Animation had not used the medium since Dumbo in 1940. According to Ric, watercolor is pretty scary to work with. You can literally paint and entire scene, then blow it with that one last brush stroke. Not having worked with watercolor for so long, they weren’t quite sure what paper to use. They researched Snow White only to discover the Windsor- Newton paper used on that film was long gone. Ric explained that there were a lot of trials and tribulations along the way. Once the style of the film was locked down, workshops began. A year was spent in acquainting the background artists with the watercolor style so as to keep the feeling of light and color they saw in Hawaii. The production team interviewed Maurice Noble, one of the original watercolor painters on Snow White and went into the “morgue,� pulling out paintings from the 1930s from such film shorts as Hawaiian Holiday and Through The Mirror.
* Several inside jokes are hidden in the movie: for example, a poster of Mulan is on the wall of Lilo's bedroom, and a picture of the Magic Kingdom can be seen when Lilo and Stitch look at postcards in the street.
* "David is a very accepting guy," Jason Scott Lee said of his animated character. "He's a real image of the Hawaiian community. He acknowledges the aliens and says, `Yeah, there's room for everybody.'"
* Following the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentago, the Orlando Weekly reported on September 20, 2001 that "Disney's extraterrestrial animated feature, Lilo & Stitch, also may get a makeover. After all, the climax of this feature-length 'toon, produced entirely at the backstage animation facility at Disney/MGM Studios, was built around the then-comical notion that a cute little alien would sneak on board a 747, then take the jumbo jet for a joy ride through the of Honolulu. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||