Seeing Double: LILO & STITCH andHOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON

Nearly 30 years ago, Gus Van Sant remade Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho nearly shot for shot and caught endless amounts of grief about it. Now the idea of slavishly remaking a popular movie is just par for the family film course. Van Sant’s Psycho doesn’t really work as its own movie, but as an experiment in auteurist personality it retains a weird power. Somehow copying another director’s work in most choices, save for a few frames here and there, ends up with a movie with an entirely different flavor. Where, then, is the soul of a film? Much to ponder. Not so much in this summer’s big live-action remakes of relatively recent animated classics, coincidentally from the same creatives. Animators Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois co-directed Disney’s Lilo & Stitch in 2002 and Dreamworks’ How to Train Your Dragon in 2010. You likely recall that the former is a sprightly, sentimental sci-fi comedy with a wild extraterrestrial critter finding a family with a troubled pair of sisters. The latter is a coming-of-age Viking fantasy in which a teen boy makes an unlikely pet out of a dragon. Both imaginative riffs on the boy-and-his-dog story have easy charm and likable characters and distinctive styles with Stitch drawn in light primary colors, soft rounded shapes and a Hawaiian palate, Dragon a Nordic action-figure ready CG pop-up picture book aesthetic. To transpose them to live action reduces the magic of the animation to humdrum effects, and their familiar story beats go from comfort watch repetition to sluggish recreations. They aren’t fully bad movies, but they are thoroughly boring and superfluous. I couldn’t watch even a single second of them without wishing I was watching the originals. 

The Lilo & Stitch remake is caught between two flawed approaches. When it directly copies shots and sequences from the original, it’s a charmless, lesser version. When it diverges, trimming characters or adding plot threads, it under-delivers or over-complicates. That leaves the whole thing a limp exercise in diminishment. The characters are still basically likable, with Stitch a more photo-real cartoon in the familiar design, and Sanders returns to voice his warbles, gargles, and growls. His interactions with the lead girls have some echoes of the original’s appeal. Little sister Lilo (Maia Kealoha) is a funny kid, and her older sister (Sydney Elizebeth Agudong) has a natural, low-key, sunny-but-stressed affect. Together they have a believable sibling chemistry that helps sell their strained and sentimental dynamic. And we almost believe they’d like this mutant creature. But it's all so dutiful in hitting the expected beats, and assumes investment more than earns it. The picture comes from director Dean Fleischer Camp, co-creator of the cute stop-motion Marcel the Shell with Shoes On. That character’s quiet eccentricities and small emotions bubbling up big might seem a fine match for a movie whose inspiration is full of cuddly edges with a big hit of emotionality. Instead the whole project settles for loud and obvious. It’s a pretty dull redo that knows the notes but not why they sang in the first place. 

For better and worse, it’s only karaoke found in How to Train Your Dragon’s live-action remake. Its commitment to recreating the look of the creatures and sets and costumes frames the movie as an extended deja vu experience. A good memory for the original makes it feel like you’ve already seen the storyboards or animatics; their frames are copied often exactly to make the new one. That it is Dean DeBlois himself in the director’s chair makes it all the more obvious we’re seeing a product of the exact same vision. At every moment, we’re looking at live actors dressed up to resemble their animated inspirations composited into effects sequences that are mostly the same as the original movie’s but with slightly more detailing on the computer animation. Everyone involved accepts the task and acquits themselves fine. It’s note for note the same. The original story is so solid, and the soaring score from John Powell is so stirring that it’d be hard to flub entirely. The plotting still works, the young actors are all cute and likable, and the adults (from Nick Frost and Peter Serafinowicz to Gerard Butler reprising his role as the Viking chief) bring enough warmth and gravitas. But unlike a rewatch of a classic, which has comforting familiarity and the benefit of deepening awareness, there’s a pervasive sense in a redo of tracing over fresh images for a stale paycheck. What’s so buoyant and imaginative in animation turns heavy and dreary when you have to see real people doing it.