Lilo, Toothless and Totoro Too

My anime article this week starts from a non-anime news story. As of writing, the American box-office charts are topped by the 2025 “live-action” Lilo & Stitch, from Disney, and How to Train Your Dragon, from DreamWorks. Lilo & Stitch is also topping Japan’s box-office. In the Japanese dub, Stitch is voiced by the omnipresent Koichi Yamadera, who also voices Donald Duck, Aladdin’s Genie and Shrek’s Donkey. Anime fans, though, are likelier to know Yamadera as Spike Spiegel, hero of Cowboy Bebop; as Togusa, the “ordinary” cop in the Ghost in the Shell franchise; and as the swordsman Jubei in Ninja Scroll.

As AWN readers will know, the English-language Stitch has been voiced for decades by Chris Sanders, who co-wrote and co-directed the original animated Lilo & Stitch in 2002. You’ll also know that Sanders shared those credits with Dean DeBlois, and that they reteamed for the CG-animated How to Train Your Dragon in 2010.

DeBlois has stayed with the Toothless franchise, directing two Dragon sequels solo, and now the live-action remake. Meanwhile, Sanders moved to other projects, including last year’s The Wild Robot and its in-development sequel. However, Sanders still voices Stitch in the new live-action version, which was helmed by Dean Fleischer Camp (Marcel the Shell with Shoes On). That film is being shown in Japan both dubbed and subtitled, so cinemagoers have the choice of either hearing Sanders’ Stitch or Yamadera’s, or going twice for both.

For now, I’ll focus on Lilo & Stitch, though I’ll come back to Toothless and wider issues later.

Lilo and Stitch and Totoro too

Back in 2002, when the first Lilo & Stitch had just opened in the UK, I interviewed Sanders and Deblois in London for this site. Witnessing Sanders speaking fluent Stitch was something. “From Sanders’ larynx emerges the familiar cackling, howling gibber that we’ve learned to associate with the blue-skinned, pint-sized genetic whatsit.”

I also learned about the film’s debt to Hayao Miyazaki. Sanders highlighted how Miyazaki influenced the interactions of Lilo and her sister Nani. DeBlois singled out Miyazaki’s 1988 Totoro – “You’ve got those fantastic elements and yet you feel like you’ve watched a story that really existed between a family.”

Lilo was voiced in Disney’s film (the English-language version) by Daveigh Chase. Meanwhile, David Ogden Stiers voiced Jumba, Stitch’s inventor – a mad scientist, but far nicer than Zach Galifianikis’ creepy take in the remake. Chase and Stiers would soon reunite in the Disney dub of Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, where Chase voiced Chihiro and Stiers voiced the spider-man Kamaji. Ironically, Spirited Away beat Lilo to the 2002 animated feature Oscar.

Stitch’s Japanese adventure

Lilo & Stitch would become an anime, though not a Miyazaki one - and not a “Lilo & Stitch” one either, as Lilo was jettisoned. Have a biscuit if you’ve ever heard of this corner of the franchise. Like Japanese TV commercials that deploy Hollywood stars, the Stitch! anime has been seldom shown in Anglophone territories, and you won’t find it on home editions or Disney+. Don’t confuse it with the American Lilo & Stitch TV series from 2003-6, which is tied in closely with the original film and which you can find on Disney+.

The anime came later – it was just called Stitch!, running from 2008 to 2011. It wasn’t by Disney Television Animation, but was instead animated by Japan’s Madhouse. That’s the studio which had made Ninja Scroll, Death Note, Perfect Blue, Black Lagoon and the epic psycho-thriller Monster, which I covered previously. Okay, so I’m highlighting the studio’s violent titles – Madhouse’s gentler fare included Cardcaptor Sakura in the 1990s and the wonderful 2007 Den-noh Coil, which I’ve also covered.

That Stitch! exists may be more interesting than the series itself. As the series opens, the blue monster crashes not on Hawaii but on a lush fictional Japanese island, Izayoi. Instead of Lilo, Stitch meets Yuna, a preteen girl tomboy who practices karate and helps Stitch carry out good deeds. Several other characters from the Disney version return in, including the bungling whale-sized Gantu – who was cut from the new film - and the megalomaniac Dr. Hamsterviel.

One anime-only character was Delia, Hamsterviel’s long-eared femme fatale partner. She was voiced in Japanese by the esteemed actress Romi Park, Edward Elric in Fullmetal Alchemist and Hange in Attack on Titan. Meanwhile, Stitch was voiced by his regular Japanese actor Koichi Yamadera.

The show was plainly successful, as it ran more than 80 episodes plus specials and films. It’s a reminder, should you need it, of the power of cute in Japan. I’ve seen Stitch soft toys festooning Tokyo toyshops, competing directly with the likes of Totoro. Sanders, on his own account, was fascinated by a particular kind of mammalian head; low eyes and a nose that’s big and high on the face. Think of Toothless in How To Train Your Dragon.

From the little I’ve seen of the Stitch! anime, I wasn’t impressed. The difference in presentation is obvious; the anime’s stock, frequently static expressions are a thin substitute for L&S’s quirkily charming toon acting, even in Disney’s TV incarnation. You miss the stubby, bottom-heavy designs of Lilo and her Hawaiian peers, and the softly luminous island scenery.

More important, Yuna and Stitch lack the eccentric chemistry of Lilo and Stitch. The whole point of the original is that Disney’s Lilo and Stitch are both damaged, angry infants acting out chaotically. Moreover, Lilo is much more of a character than Stitch himself. In contrast, Yuna just comes over as a standard anime girl, without such psycho-baggage, and that feels pointless. It’s Snoopy without Charlie Brown, or Scooby-Doo without Shaggy.

Then there’s a specific reason why many Western fans of Lilo & Stitch who do encounter the anime reject it furiously. It’s because of an inexplicable story decision. Let’s be clear; it would have been easy to have established the Stitch! anime as a parallel universe, what-if, story, where Stitch lands in Izayoi instead of Hawaii. That wouldn’t have ruled out crossovers – just have the anime Stitch meet Lilo via a dimension jump, and maybe “her” Stitch too.

Instead, the anime Stitch! is presented as a sequel to Lilo & Stitch, set after the Disney duo split up. That premise, for many fans, is what Lilo would call an abomination. One of the last Stitch! episodes has Lilo seemingly showing up and joyfully reuniting with Stitch… only for her to turn out to be Lilo’s daughter, with an adult Lilo cameoing at the end for a last goodbye. It was plainly meant as a touching crossover; Western fans were likelier to take it as the final insult.

That bizarre story call may have cemented Stitch’s ugly duckling status in the West. Almost the whole anime has been dubbed in English (the dubbed Stitch wasn’t voiced by Sanders but by Ben Diskin). It began its American broadcast on Disney XD in 2011… and was cancelled five episodes later. Today the English dub is reportedly streamed in territories such as India, and you can stream an English-subbed version in Japan. But for Anglophone viewers, it’s a “Disney anime” that many Disney fans and many anime fans haven’t heard of or reject outright.

Oh, and in 2017, there was a Chinese TV version, which jettisoned Lilo yet again, now substituting a Chinese girl called Wang Ai Ling. Called Stitch & Ai, it ran only 13 parts and again had a minimal Anglophone streaming release. I’ve not seen it, but I’ll put the English-dubbed trailer below.

A Toothless clone?

Going back to the new Lilo & Stitch film in cinemas, it wasn’t for me, as someone who loves the cartoon. On the other hand, I’m now on record for liking the new live-action How To Train Your Dragon, directed by Dean DeBlois. That seems to put me on the side of the general audience but not on some of the critics, who saw it as a perversely redundant clone of the CG film. Creatively cowardly, argues The Atlantic’s David Sims; soulless slop, blasts The Telegraph’s Robbie Collin.

My own feeling was that Dragon was a rare thing: a (CG) cartoon that had worked very well, being turned into a live-action (with CG) film that also worked very well. I think that if someone hadn’t ever seen the cartoon and tried the new film, there’s a good chance they’d be thoroughly entertained, setting Dragon apart from many live-action remakes. I find that rather fascinating.

For me it’s a comparable fascination to watching those many anime, especially cinema anime, which use animation yet resemble live-action. A quarter-century ago, an animation critic whom I respect told me he hated Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke partly for that reason. For him, its aesthetics were simply too close to live-action, which betrayed the point of animation. You could make the same case against many anime films that I’d count among my favorites. They include Grave of the Fireflies, Whisper of the Heart, Patlabor 2, Perfect Blue, Jin-roh, A Silent Voice, The Garden of Words and When Marnie was There.

I also rather like 5 Centimeters per Second, Makoto Shinkai’s early film from 2007, which is just about to get a live-action Japanese remake – I’ll put the trailers for both respective versions below. (I should add, though, that if anyone wants to watch a really good Shinkai-style story in live-action, try the Japanese series First Love on Netflix.)

I’ve brought up these issues before, when I discussed The Apothecary Diaries. That’s a TV anime which could also be censured for being too near live-action. Back then, I confessed I said I don’t have any grand knock-down answer to the criticism. To modify that a bit, I only have the sense that in the best of these titles, there’s still a delight in seeing them rendered in animated form that couldn’t be replicated in live-action . That’s not to say that they couldn’t also delight in live-action, like How To Train Your Dragon.

I find that holds even when these films have few or no inherently “cartoon” characters, whose nature is to deform or move in ways that work only in animation, like Daffy Duck and Spider-Punk. The original Lilo & Stitch has several such characters, though they’re cut down a lot in the new remake. In contrast, most of the important characters in the CG How to Train Your Dragon are humans and I’d argue even the dragons aren’t that cartoony, despite their skillful species caricatures (the feline Toothless, the bulldog Gronckles).

In anime, there are relatively few anime characters that feel like they were created for animation. That makes sense, considering their origins. Even more than Hollywood animation, they’re often based on stories which originated in other media – often manga comics or light novels. There are exceptions, of course – Shinkai’s 5 Centimeters per Second was an original work in animation. However, it’s very common in Japan to have live-action and animated versions of the same story.

There’s an interesting instance of this coming up soon – the movie All You Need is Kill. It’s by Studio 4°C, which made the gorgeous Children of the Sea which I covered last week. Its new film is based on a (very good) Japanese science-fiction novel… which was already adapted by Hollywood in 2014 as the Tom Cruise blockbuster Edge of Tomorrow. Okay, so it’s clear from the trailer that the anime will be different, centering on the woman character (the one who Emily Blunt played in live-action).

Still, I’ve already seen and enjoyed much closer live-action remakes. The example I’d highlight is Erased above, a timeslip thriller which you can find both in animated form on Crunchyroll and as a live-action serial on Netflix. These two versions do have differences – I wrote an article on them – but they’re often very close and I still found watching them “in stereo” to be thoroughly enjoyable. Trivia: the English-dubbed hero in the anime trailer is voiced by Ben Diskin, who was Stitch in the little-seen anime Stitch! dub.

Then there’s this celebrated Brazilian fan-film, which sets out to meticulously recreate the first minutes of Miyazaki’s Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind. For anyone wondering, the film is emphatically not an AI creation. It was shot in Brazil by director Chris Tex and his team, taking nearly seven years to make. If you want to know what an AI Nausicaa film looks like, there’s a new one right here, by “Enigmaity studio,” which has made several other Miyazaki films.

This, of course, raises issues that would take a whole other article to discuss. It’s been only three months since the world was bombarded by pseudo-Ghibli AI images, courtesy of ChatGPT. So, where’s the line between “good” and “bad” recreations of animation and anime? Sometimes it’s easy being Manichean. Chris Tex’s seven-year labor of love on Nausicaa is safely on the “good” side, for example. As for Enigmaity’s AI output… Well, there’s a certain meme-grade video that’s used in such situations, and I’ll duly embed it below. It’s from the documentary Never-Ending Man: Hayao Miyazaki.

Maybe it’s just my deficiency, but I’m just not as revolted when I watch AI animation as many Netzins say they are, or Miyazaki. (I’m even quite impressed by the zombie in the clip above.) That’s even while I appreciate what such animation can represent; artistic theft on an unimaginable scale, and a threat to creative industries worldwide. And perhaps that’s why I can enjoy a live-action “clone” like How to Train Your Dragon. Not that DreamWorks’ film was made in AI, of course; much of its pleasure came from the physicality of actors like Gerard Butler and Nick Frost. But for some critics, the Dragon remake is part of the same corrosive, cowardly mentality: the replication of art into worthless pabulum.

I’m not sold on that judgement, yet. But it’s remarkable how this is the kind of debate that few people could have imagined back in 2002, when the first Lilo & Stitch opened, or even when Hiccup met Toothless back in 2010. All that’s clear is that when the same number of years have gone by again – when we’re looking back from 2040, or 2048 – all the reflections that I’ve written here will be so absurdly dated that only an AI could read them.

Andrew Osmond is a British author and journalist, specialising in animation and fantasy media. His email is [email protected].