I no longer know what we're complaining about

Depending on how you're counting*, we're either 15 years into the Disney live-action remake trend, or we're 30 years into it. Disney leaves too much money on the table to not keep making live-action (or in the case of the Lion King remakes, realistic animation) remakes. Snow White bombed beyond belief, but then Lilo & Stitch dropped this past weekend and made the most money a movie has ever made on Memorial Day weekend. And so we continue apace.

The original Lilo & Stitch is beloved for many, many reasons. It was a complete masterpiece, and in 2002, it was fairly revolutionary for its portrayal of a really weird kid in the central role. Anyone upset about a new movie somehow diluting the memory and legacy of the original film is either unaware or is willfully ignoring that between 2003 and 2017, there were two direct-to-video sequel films, a television film, two television specials, and three different television series, comprising a total of 104 episodes. One more piece of Stitch media is not going to dilute the original film's esteem by any measure. And it kind of seems like they've tried to, to no avail.

Disney is a cold, unfeeling machine, and there's no ethical consumption under capitalism. Let's go ahead and get that out of the way up top. I saw Lilo & Stitch (2025) with my kid this past holiday weekend, and my main takeaways were:

1. It's cute, and it's exactly what it needs to be: a perfectly serviceable family movie that keeps in place everything magical or memorable about the original, and does a fine job of splitting the difference between 1:1 scene recreations from the 2002 film and new material, with some nice nods to the extended Stitch "lore" (for lack of a better term)
2. It provides a chance to course correct to highlight more actual Hawaiian/Pacific Islander performers, as the original voice of Lilo in nearly all prior media was Daveigh Chase, a white actor. (The casting of lighter-skinned Pacific Islanders in a couple of roles also resulted in controversy, however.) Maia Kealoha is an absolute delight as Lilo, and Disney is already roaring ahead with sequels in order to strike while the iron is "still a child."

Before I saw the movie, I saw a bunch of complaining about one aspect of the artistry of the remake, and over the past couple of days I've seen a lot of people angry about a lot of things, despite all of these people behaving in a way that makes me believe they haven't actually seen the movie. And while aspects of their criticism are valid, the overall outrage is so varied and so off-base that I'm just having trouble keeping hold of the thread. Maybe there isn't a thread to keep hold of.