Here comes the happy family now — Lilo, Nani and Stitch. All images © Disney Enterprises, Inc. All rights reserved.

Lilo & Stitch is a perfect family film -- and great entertainment for all ages. And yes, it's a "traditional, hand drawn, 2D" feature length cartoon, utilizing everything Disney animation does right in its best efforts. If this is the last shot traditional animation artists have before all Hollywood cartoons go CG, they couldn't ask for anything better to justify their stand. This is personality character animation done right; caricatured human beings we can relate to, way-out space creatures to laugh at and literal flights of fancy visualized with the flair that hand drawn, hand painted animated cartooning can claim as exclusively its own. Lilo & Stitch has humor, heart, style and art -- with the highest standards we've come to expect from Walt Disney Feature Animation.

Back to the Basics
After last year's disappointing Atlantis: The Lost Empire, many pundits, this reviewer included, thought Disney may have lost its way. And that misstep, in the summer of Shrek and prior to a string of successful CG features (Monsters Inc., Jimmy Neutron, Ice Age), didn't bode well for the house that Mickey and the Seven Dwarfs built. But Disney hasn't completely given up on its traditional cartoon animation (yet), and its smartest move here was to place its trust in Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois (co-directors & co-writers) giving this film a cohesive singular vision that's been missing in Disney features of late.

Chris Sanders (right) and Dean DeBlois were the creative visionaries behind the film.

One of my biggest Disney complaints in recent years is that the character designs in each film don't mesh. Atlantis is an extreme example where the characters are from different movies and the storylines are bifurcated and inconsistent. Lilo & Stitch is wonderfully old-fashioned in its simple straightforward storytelling, charming characters and strong motivations. Not only did Sanders come up with the original idea for the film, but he worked in close collaboration with DeBlois to write the screenplay, storyboard virtually all the scenes, record Stitch's dialogue and direct the film. The duo functioned as their own heads of story as well, expanding on a creative partnership that began with Mulan. This process ensured that the filmmakers' vision would remain constant throughout the many stages of production.

"We wanted to make a film that focused on the simplicity and warmth of the relationships," DeBlois explains. "Dumbo and Bambi were our two biggest influences because of the focused story and simplistic art direction. They had a purity and nostalgia that we loved. Some recent films have pushed to achieve technical marvels and emphasize dimension. We liked the idea of abandoning some of that in favor of emphasis on the character development. We wanted to slow down the world a little bit and do away with the epic set pieces and the throngs of people so that we could deal with two characters and how they interact with one another."