Lilo teaches Stitch all about "the King."

Ugly Ducklings
Despite the film's marketing, it is really about the relationship of Lilo, an odd little Hawaiian girl and her sister Nani, a struggling 20-something adult woman unprepared to juggle the responsibility of caring for Lilo and managing her own life's affairs. Along comes "Experiment 626," who, crash-landing on Kauai, is mistaken for a dog and adopted by the lonely Lilo, who promptly renames him "Stitch." Pursued by intergalactic forces, Stitch is forced to learn right and wrong, and most importantly the meaning of "family," incognito on Earth. Meanwhile, Lilo uses her new pet to play, make mischief and imitate Elvis. Both are "ugly ducklings" yearning for acceptance by their own kind, who come together in their own world.

"We wanted to break some of the storytelling conventions," says Sanders. "One of the things we set out to do from the very beginning was to let go of the idea of good and evil. That's great if you're doing a fairy tale, but we wanted this film to have a different feel. Our characters have more shades of gray; they aren't all black and white. They embody human frailties. Lilo, Stitch and Nani are neither good nor bad. They're a mixture of those things like every human being. As a result of that, we got a more subtle and interesting mix of character relationships."

The comedy comes from many places. Stitch's view of Earth and its inhabitants is one source. Designed to be a monster, he's plopped into a suburb with no appropriate city to destroy. One hilarious sequence has him build a replica of San Francisco out of toys and materials in Lilo's room, then demonstrates what he would do to it. The reactions of Lilo and Nani to Stitch's behavior provide the animators with ample opportunity to draw facial expressions and body language that say more than any cheap one-liner.

The timing and character animation is superb at every turn.

Great Animation
"Animating Lilo was the most fun assignment I've ever had," observes Andreas Deja. "It was also the most complex. She is a character who has big issues. She thinks, she plots, she has deep emotions and you don't express those things with big-action poses. There is a tremendous degree of subtlety. My first drawings were very active so I had to learn how to scale them down. I spent a lot of time getting just the right expressions or looking for that one pose that could tell the story. That's hard to do in animation because our medium is about motion and movement. It's always trickier to animate the more subtle characters and Lilo is super subtle.

"The reason why Lilo & Stitch is such a unique project is the depth of emotions that the characters have and the rich, interesting, unconventional and quirky relationships between them," adds Deja. "It's different from other material and has a very spontaneous feel to it. I have two sisters, a younger and an older one, and the relationship between Lilo and Nani rang true for me. I remember back home how the two of them were always yelling at each other even though they loved each other. These are real characters."