Lilo and Stitch vs. Spirited Away

To preface this, I should like to point out that no matter what I say, I'm sure Maggie and Adan will still think that Lilo and Stitch was the better movie. And despite empirical evidence or a good bloody argument, I'm sure that they'll point out that I like Spirited Away better because I'm biased towards anime. That may be the case, but I have attempted to let my otaku-dom slide as I evaluate these movies based on my film criticism training.

I should like to begin by pointing out that neither Lilo & Stitch nor Spirited Away is, by any means, a perfect movie. Both of them have deep structural flaws that taint these two otherwise perfectly enjoyable films. Both movies start off with tremendous promise and then start to go awry somewhere in the middle, building to unsatisfactory endings, made even worse by the promise of such great beginnings. A bad film is not disappointing when it is bad through-and-through, but a film that could have been so much better makes one feel so much worse when it ends badly.

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Lilo and Stitch has a great opening. Stitch is fearsome genetic experiment gone wrong. Super-intelligent and built for pure evil, he shows cunning as he escapes his captors and crash-lands on earth. This is possibly the best opening for a Disney movie that I've seen in years. It parallels Belle's song about reading in Beauty and the Beast (as far as great openings go).

The movie keeps up it's promise as it introduces Lilo - she's late for dance class because she always feeds her favorite fish a peanut butter sandwich on Thursdays. Lilo is at once a weirdo and a freaky outcast as she bites another girl - and Lilo bites hard. It's hard not to like Lilo. In Aladdin, Aladdin explains that he steals to survive - that is, he's bad because he's a thief, but you've got to like him because he's doing what he's got to do. Lilo is likeable in the same way. Sure, it's not right to bite other kids, but that other girl had it coming, and if you were Lilo, you'd have done the same.

Early on in the movie, Stitch is a welcome departure from more normal Disney characters. We're used to Disney giving us clean-cut heroes and bad guys. Stitch isn't so clean cut. He could go either way. In fact, he could go off at any minute. He spits, he drools, he swears (although we're gypped as he swears in an alien language), and he's ugly.

Similarly, Chihiro wins the audience's sympathies in Spirited Away without being a perfect hero. Chihiro is whiny brat at the film's opening. Her parents are unsympathetic to her, and so are we - at least until Chihiro's parents stupidly eat unguarded food in an abandoned amusement park. Chihiro shows us that she's got a brain in her head by expressing the correct amount of fear and caution for the situation at hand.

Over the next five minutes Chihiro gets our sympathy as ghosts start appearing everywhere and she finds herself in a crazy bathhouse Wonderland, populated by Japanese mythological and folklore figures who are complaining because Chihiro smells "alive"! She's scared shitless - and in her position, you'd be scared too.

As the complex characters of Lilo, Stitch, and Chihiro continue their respective journeys, we learn the answers to the usual movie structure questions as to what each character wants and needs. Chihiro wants to find her parents and rescue them. In order to do so, she must get a job at the bathhouse. Signing Yubaba's contract is an obstacle - Yubaba steals Chihiro's name but gives her the job she needs to stay alive in this world. As Chihiro forgets her old name and identity, she begins to forget about her parents and her old life.

Lilo wants to continue living with her older sister, Nani. In order for their (small, imperfect) family to continue existing, Nani must find a job and impress Cobra Bubbles, the social worker. Nani agrees to let Lilo adopt Stitch from the dog pound as a gesture of good will, but Stitch presents himself as an obstacle to Nani finding a job, as he causes mischief wherever he goes.

Here's where things start to get ugly, plot-wise: What does Stitch want? We know in the first ten minutes of the film that Stitch want to avoid his captors. That's his goal, and he achieves his goal in about 15 minutes. His captors don't pose any more of a threat until the last 15 minutes or so of the film.

But wait! There's more: By order of his genetic programming, Stitch feels the need to cause chaos in large cities. Fortunately he's trapped on a Hawaiian island (which one?! Apparently not the one with Honolulu, despite the map at the film's opening pointing to the largest island...) by his severe allergy to water. Stitch is never given the chance to stand before a large city and choose not destroy it. This is a major flaw in the overall film. In classical movie structure everything that's set up in the beginning of the film must come out (or come together) in the end. Since Jumba (the mad scientist) says of Stitch early in the film:

"His destructive programming is taking effect. He will be irresistibly drawn to large cities where he will back up sewers, reverse street signs, and steal everyone's left shoe."

We had darn well better see some left-shoe-stealing action by the end of the movie. But we don't! This is the best line in the entire film, and its prediction never comes to pass.

Instead, the film tries to find a new goal for Stitch part-way through. He leaves Lilo in the night, and takes a copy of the book "The Ugly Duckling" with him. Alone and sulking in the woods, his ears down and his eyes sparkling sadly, Stitch opens the book to it's single illustration, a picture of a duck saying "I'm Lost." This scene is where the movie starts getting exponentially worse.

The Ugly Duckling book should be telling us something important about Stitch, and it isn't. Stitch isn't the Ugly Duckling. He'll never grow into a beautiful swan, and he even has one friend - Lilo, so he's not a complete reject like the Duckling. Worse still, Stitch isn't lost! He has a good idea of where he is, as he was able to steer his spaceship there. Lilo hints earlier in the film that maybe Stitch doesn't know who he is because he doesn't have any parents, or a family. This could be considered a diffenent kind of "lost".

For whatever reason, that just doesn't work in the film. I don't buy for a minute that Stitch is "lost". His emotional crisis seems totally out-of-place. I could have stomached some of Stitch feeling bad, but Disney throws in a LOT of Stitch feeling bad. Here is a situation where less is more, and the film is over-doing it.

They also over-did-it with the phrase "ohana." In the brief 85 minute running time the, characters utter the following phrase about 6 times:

"Ohana. Ohana means family, and family means no one gets left behind."

It's a fine moral, and it's very touching. But does it really need to be repeated about once every 14 minutes? Actually, since no one says it for the first 30 minutes, that means a character is giving us the ohana treatment about once every nine minutes by the end of the film. By the third time, I assure you, dear reader, that I began to yell at the television.

I'm not saying I'm a jaded hipster who can't feel anything (despite what Rick thinks), or indeed, that Lilo & Stitch wasn't a touching movie; it's more like Lilo & Stitch was a movie that touched me the wrong way.

Ohana. Ohana means family, and family means no one gets left behind. There are only two points at which it was appropriate for characters to say this in Lilo & Stitch: Once, when Nani was storming out of the house, leaving Lilo alone, and Lilo says it, and the second time is when Stitch is drowning, and Lilo says that Stitch is family.

Ohana. Ohana means family, and family means no one gets left behind. Possibly the biggest flaw in Lilo & Stitch is there are so few points in the movie when it seems like a real possibility that someone will be left behind. No matter how mad Nani gets at Lilo, we don't really believe she'll give Lilo up to social services without a struggle, and no matter what trouble Stitch is causing, we don't really believe for a minute that Lilo will let him go.

In Spirited Away, however, even though I knew that Chihiro would somehow rescue her parents in the end, there were points at which Chihiro was in real danger, and I was legitimately scared. For example, when Chihiro is being chased by a flock of sharp paper dolls (a traditional Japanese magical item), and must slam the door behind her to avoid being killed, I was really, really worried about her.

Although Lilo & Stitch is a comedy, there is a legitimate space pirate adventure segment at the beginning. The stakes are high and the situation should be more grave than it is. When Stitch almost drowned, I was worried about him. However, I should have been more worried about Stitch at the end of the film, during the climax. I wasn't worried at all, though, because the ending was ridiculous.

In the end of Lilo & Stitch, several characters suddenly switch alignments and goals in unbelievable ways. Stitch starts speaking English at an unbelievable pace, and Nani is far to accepting of the sudden realizations that aliens exist, and that said aliens have kidnapped her sister. At that point, the entire film seems almost like a paranoid fantasy that Nani has made up so she doesn't have to deal with the overwhelming emotional loss of social services taking Lilo away. (In this reading of the film, Stitch is an imaginary friend Lilo invented to make up for the loss of her parents, and when Nani starts to go crazy, she can see him, too. But that's Lilo & Stitch the Schitzo Drama.)

The aliens sent to capture Stitch turn on a dime to save him:

Jumba: WHAT?? after all you put me through, you expect me to help you just like that? JUST LIKE THAT???
Stitch: Ih
Jumba: Fine
Pleakley: Fine?!? You're doing what he says?
Jumba: Uh, he's very persuasive.

MAYBE if Jumba had expressed some interest earlier in seeing his little experiment run wild and free, I'd believe this twist. But he didn't. Suddenly Pleakley and Jumba, two of our main antagonist, are on the side of the good guys. And the aliens who try to keep peace and uphold laws in the galaxy are suddenly powerful bad guys. As N. would say: WHAAA??

Spirited Away is not free of similar flaws: At a key moment in the film, Chihiro suddenly starts telling a story about almost drowning in a river as a small child. Her only friend in Wonderland, Haku, has morphed into a dragon at this point and has long since forgotten his real name. Because of the random anecdote Chihiro has just shared, Haku realizes that he was named after the river she almost drowned in. Now he can be free of Yubaba's work contract on his soul. WHAAAA??

The ending of Spirited Away is not a ridiculous fiasco, but it is weirdly boring. The height of action in the film peaks somewhere in the middle (as I pointed out in my longer Spirited Away analysis). When Chihiro should be rushing into danger, she's riding a train to some nice old lady's house to have some tea. When it comes down to the climactic scene where Chihiro saves her parents, her final task is way, way too easy. In a traditional 3-act film, that's the point at which Chihiro should be almost dead, and have lost everything over seemingly insurmountable odds, and must face her darkest fear alone.

Instead, she's got some friends to help her and Yubaba has actually gotten a lot less threatening over time. This makes the ending seem, well, boring. All of the really exciting stuff, in both movies, is used up in the first 20 minutes.

But Spirited Away is still the better of the two films, for two reasons:

1. It is visually stunning.
2. It has deeper themes and metaphors.

Stitch has a very interesting character design for a Disney movie, somewhere between ugly and cute and fuzzy. He's even more interesting when he has six legs, but he insist on hiding two legs throughout the film, which I find disappointing.

Disney gets credit for doing something interesting with the visuals of Lilo & Stitch. They depart from their usual fare, particularly in the space scenes, and I would give them a lot more credit if they weren't just directly ripping off the Astro Boy style that was used recently in the Japanese Metropolis. I'd also be willing to give them more credit for their watercolor backgrounds and the updated, pudgy look that Nani has to her hips... but Disney's got nothing on Miyazaki.

Miyazaki's backgrounds are the stuff of fine-art-museum-quality-prints. When Kiki flies over her small European city in Kiki's Delivery Service, the background is ridiculously awesome, photo-quality good. When Satsuki runs through the fields looking for her lost sister Mei in My Neighbor Totoro on a summer evening, I recall my own grandparent's fields on summer evenings, and I know that Miyazaki has gotten it exactly right.

Most of Spirited Away takes place at night, and there is considerably less flying than in your average Miyazaki film, so the backgrounds are perhaps not as strong as they could be. That said, the bathhouse Wonderland is a ridiculously rich environment. Around every corner and on every floor of the towering building there is a crowd of intriguing background characters. Each of these characters is from some traditional Japanese myth or folklore or ghost story, or is a demon or god or hero that we as Americans are almost totally clueless to guess at. (Miyazaki did not invent Totoro - he just designed the character.) When Chihiro leaves the spirit plane she doesn't free everyone there because they need to go on about their own stories. The viewer is left with the feeling that the bathhouse-universe was not just there for Chihiro to visit, rather, it was always there, and will always be there.

Disney does a pretty good job of capturing modern Hawaii. I don't think they insulted any ethnic groups this time around (unlike the Pocahontas protests, or how they had to change lyrics in Aladdin). Nani has to work humiliating jobs in the service/tourist industry and Lilo takes pictures of the freakish pasty-white fat tourists, who are more alien to her than Stitch. But that's it. That's a pretty good job, but Disney doesn't begin to compare with Miyazaki's work. (A better case might be made for Mulan, but I'm not the one to write it.)

On the symbolic/theme/metaphoric level, the only thing Lilo & Stitch has to teach us is ohana. Ohana means family, and family means no one gets left behind.

One translation of the Japanese title of "Spirited Away" is "Sen and the Mysterious Disappearance of Chihiro" (Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi). When Yubaba makes Chihiro sign her employment contract, she renames Chihiro as "Sen". Chihiro begins her new life as Sen, and becomes a new person. Once a whiny, clingy, scaredy-cat, Sen becomes a hard worker, she grows some courage, and in the end she starts acting like a real hero. The old Chihiro is gone forever. The film is saying something on a very deep level about the nature of identity and how it plays into one's place in the work force. Spirited Away also has a lot to say about the nature of work, which I covered in more detail in my other essay.

And what does Lilo & Stitch teach us? Only that ohana means family, and family means no one gets left behind. Well, that, and it does have a few other poignant things to reinforce its message:

Lilo: I like you better as a sister than a mom.
Nani: Yeah?
Lilo: And you like me better as a sister than a rabbit, right?

Stitch: This is my family. I found it, all on my own. It's little, and broken, but still good. Yeah, still good.

This is a pretty complex message for a Disney film (although every Disney film is about an orphan or a single-parent household). But it's not nearly as complex as how Chihiro feels about her parents. Her parents are jerks and morons, but she loves them enough to rescues them anyway (despite N.'s suggestions to her). Because ohana means family, and family means no one gets left behind. Or forgotten.

In the end, Spirited Away is a visual masterpiece. It's not Miyazaki's best film, but it's not his worst film either. Lilo & Stitch is not as good as other Disney films of the past 15 years, but it's not nearly as bad as the Emperor's New Groove or Tarzan. To break it down for you, Spirited Away is 25 minutes of Movie Greatness, 60 minutes of Quite Good and 40 minutes of Weirdly Boring. Lilo and Stitch is 20 minutes of Quite Good, 40 minutes of OK and 25 minutes of Utter Let-Down.

Spirited Away is the winner on my blog, and in the Academy.

Comments Individual Archive Index

April 9, 2003 06:16 PM, Maggie said:

Good job Erin. Still, I liked Lilo & Stitch better.

April 9, 2003 10:24 PM, N. said:

It's true, Chihiro should've listened to me.

Can anybody tell me why the hell every freaking kid who ever got sucked into a world of magical fantasy always only wants to go home and then does so in the end after learning a valuable lesson about love/friendship/respect/Christmas?

Y'know what, y'all? The Wizard of Oz can bite me, and when I say bite, I mean HARD. Just once I'd like to see a kid who waited his whole life, hoping against hope that he'd someday get sucked into a world of magical fantasy - and who gladly forsakes his mundane existence once he gets there. The Land of Oz was in COLOR for chrissake! We get the point, why doesn't Dorothy?!

April 9, 2003 11:04 PM, Agnieszka said:

You probably want to read some Andre Norton novels then. There's a lot of books where the protagonist gets sucked into some other magical world and her or she likes it there much better than the normal world and has no desire to leave. Even though the magical worlds are sometimes dangerous and deadly, they are still better because they are magical.

April 9, 2003 11:12 PM, N. said:

Amen to that.

April 9, 2003 11:25 PM, thecomicman said:

when i finally watch 'Spirited Away' i will write a similar essay. i have no strange alliances to either anime or Disney, but i've had very little formal training in film theory, except in the areas of sound and special effects.

but i have watched a lot of cartoons (American, Japanese, French, Mexican, and even an Icelandic one where some dude almost drowns), and i know what i like. these are my qualifications.

April 10, 2003 12:32 AM, Halifax said:

Yeah, and what tcm likes are cartoons where the same footage is used every time a character walks (through the miracle of clip-art animation) and whose animators have never heard of parallax.

Jerksquad!!

April 10, 2003 12:41 AM, thecomicman said:

also, i didn't mention this in my original post but i feel that bringing other Miyazaki and Disney works into a discussion that is titled "Lilo and Stitch vs. Spirited Away" is not valid. so i will not be bringing up other works in my treatise.

April 10, 2003 03:23 AM, Kari said:

Might want to correct the part about Haku to say that he was the river she was almost drowned in, as opposed to simply named after.

Falling in love with a river seems pretty pointless though too, eh?

April 10, 2003 01:39 PM, said:

N. sez: "The Land of Oz was in COLOR for chrissake! We get the point, why doesn't Dorothy?!"

Well, that's just the musical anyway. In the books, she does eventually abandon Kansas to live in Oz full time.

I just realized that Spirited Away could've been more interesting if we started with Sen as a bathhouse worker when something triggers her memory and she begins to get flashes of a totally different life. At the very least, her parents would seem less idiotic if their pig bodies were an established fact and not an act of stupidity directly witnessed by the audience.

April 10, 2003 02:09 PM, ET said:

Oops, that was me.

April 10, 2003 03:43 PM, Eugene said:

I still like Lilo and Stitch better as well, though it pains me to say so, simply because I enjoyed it more. I like deep messages in film as much as the next guy (possibly more, depending on who the next guy is), but I also like just plain fun movies. Miyazaki has done plenty of work that manages to do both, and a lot of the fun was missing from Spirited Away, buried under the stunning yet bizarre images. Strangely I really started to warm to the story when some cute Disney characters were added to it, and my favorite character was No-Face!

N makes a good point, and I hope he writes that film where the kids prefer to stay in the other land. The closest I can think of is Narnia, where the kids get their cake and eat it too. They live a full happy life in Narnia, leave it accidentally (bad luck, that), and then return to good old Britain as kids again. Lather, rinse, repeat. There may be some elements of this in the Dark Materials novels as well... I hope not to spoil the plot, but there are characters from the "normal" world and characters from "fantasy" worlds that cross over. One would be happy to give up his/her world for the other, but they can't for reasons I won't go into.

Very nice analysis, Erin, and well worth the wait. How about comparing these films to The Iron Giant now? If you haven't seen it I would highly recommend it (there's a special edition DVD coming out soon). I think it is a near-perfect movie with only a couple of flaws. It certainly hits the mark more consistently than Lilo or Spirited.

BTW, I do think Lilo and Stitch is better than most recent Disney attempts. I rank it with Aladdin as my most favorite of Disney movies, which also includes Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, and The Black Cauldron. Recent movies have mostly sucked.

April 10, 2003 03:44 PM, John said:

I actually enjoyed the Emperor's New Clothes, particularly since the main character in that film was a snivelly, greedy bastard for at least half the film.

Spirited Away was magnificent, but I can't say that I'm crazily looking forward to seeing it again. Certainly not in the way that I enjoyed Castle in the Sky. But then again it's not a 'fun' movie persay.

On the other hand, Lilo and Stitch was more fun and I'd say that the majority of it was pretty good. But when their house gets destroyed and they're totally fucked, I guess there's nowhere to go but utter cliche.

I agree, the ending does suck. I wonder if there's an earlier draft that sorts it all out. Or if this is just the best they could ever come up with. But, hey, it's a disney film. It's not like you look for groundbreaking depth. It's all about having a safe but relatively good time and making movies that kids can watch over and over and over.

How long until Disney cashes in on Lilo and Stitch with a crap, direct-to-video sequel?

April 10, 2003 04:28 PM, Eugene said:

About a couple of months, with the sequel Stitch! followed by a television series. Check your local listings...or don't. Look for the trailer on the new Miyazaki DVDs.

April 10, 2003 04:55 PM, Erin said:

The Iron Giant was super-good, but it wasn't Disney... and it wasn't as innovative as Spirited Away.

Something I don't really hit on enough in the essay is that Spritied Away is a very Japanese film. It sounds weird to say it, but I assure you that even the Japanese have a way of saying that something is "very Japanese!" A heard interviews on NPR where Japanese kids compared Spirited Away to Harry Potter. Both movies were playing at the same time in Japan, and Harry Potter was a smash hit with kids around the world that year, but Spirited Away was making a killing in the Japanese box office, beating Titanic, which was freakin' huge there.

We're not Japanese kids, so Spirited Away cannot possibly be as fun as Lilo and Stich to us. We're not Hawiian either, I know, but Lilo was also American. Disney is like freaking baseball-themed-apple-pie.

April 10, 2003 05:16 PM, Eugene said:

BTW, there has been some talk about how Miyazaki's films influenced Lilo and Stitch, from the way the water is animated to Lilo's character. Also, this tidbit from IMDB, which I actually noticed when I saw the movie the first time:

The name of one of the shops is an obvious reference to Kiki, the main character of Hayao Miyazaki's _Majo no Takkyubin (1989)_ ,(Kiki's Delivery Service).

Not to mention Daveigh Chase's excellent voice work in both Lilo and Stitch and Spirited Away...

April 10, 2003 10:41 PM, Kerry said:

Spirited away didn`t have Crumb women. What the hell was up with that? Nani and the lifeguard babe standing together made me think Curmb had snuck into the studio at night and redrew characters` bodies from the waist down.

April 11, 2003 10:55 AM, Eugene said:

I think I saw a comment somewhere that Spirited Away is more accessible to American children than you think, because we probably know as much about the Japanese folklore and tradition as modern Japanese children. Miyazaki has stated that he made this movie specifically for young teenage children because he hadn't made a movie for them before, and the sensibilities and attitudes of Japanese teens had changed so much and lost touch with their heritage. The sense of wonder (sometimes confusion) that we experience watching these bizarre gods and spirits is probably roughly the same as that felt by the average Japanese moviegoer. Perhaps it has less resonance for us because it is not connecting us with our culture, but I think the enjoyment translates fairly well.

I think this is also the first contemporary film he's done, although it seems to be a period-piece/alternate world adventure anyway. I loved the comments on four-wheel drive and credit cards, though!

As for the character designs in Lilo and Stitch, there are some nice features on the DVD that discuss the round, friendly and bottom-heavy approach. I rather liked the visual style of it, and it's different from most things I've seen. I was far less enchanted with the designs for Hercules, though they fit the motif pretty well.

April 11, 2003 11:02 AM, Eugene said:

Yes, The Iron Giant was not Disney, but it was still an American film. The previous WB attempt was Quest for Camelot, one of the most pitiable things I've ever seen. Horrible character designs, plot, dialogue, animation. Just plain bad. Why? Because they tried to be more like Disney with songs and talking objects and all of that. It did poorly. Then The Iron Giant came along, and I had no idea US animators were still capable of crafting such a fine animated movie. I thought it was pretty innovative in theme and execution - the use of CGI animation that looks like traditional cel animation was very well-handled. What was more innovative about Spirited Away?

April 11, 2003 01:23 PM, Rick said:

>The Iron Giant was super-good, but it wasn't Disney... and it wasn't as innovative as Spirited Away.

But it was better. Innovation isn't as important as quality. There have been many occasions where something was innovative, but that didn't stop it from being bad (examples: William Castle, Timecode). I think its perfectly acceptable for a movie to make a make a perfect movie that is in well-known and already done genre, like Iron Giant did. (Other examples of moveis that do this would be John Dahl's noir movies and Body Heat)

April 12, 2003 11:22 PM, Erin said:

My replied sort of implied that I liked Spirited Away more than The Iron Giant; this is not the case. The Iron Giant is a better film hands down - the plot structure is solid, there were deep themes and plenty of accessible jokes, the art was wonderful and the animation was great.

Spirited Away had more imaginative creatrures and more flash and "pizzaz" than the Iron Giant. However, I think they probably come in even in the culture-specific department. The Iron Giant has a lot of very American themes and speaks to what it's like to be an American.

The Iron Giant is the better movie in every way except art design; but even it's art design was really great.

July 12, 2004 02:10 AM, Leslie said:

no no no no...The Ring is better than the both of those but i never seen spirited away..i guess that Lilo and Stitch is better and itz more popular n 3 wayz.

June 30, 2005 02:42 PM, Ronald said:

Lilo and Stitch is better than Spirited away.You should hear Daveigh Chase's voice as Lilo's voice.In fact her voice sounds like an angel.

June 30, 2005 02:46 PM, Ronald said:

Daveigh Chase is the voice of Lilo. By the way happy almost 15th birthday Daveigh Chase. I'm your number 1 fan. I Can't wait until July 24 2005. You are the prettiest girl I've ever seen. I say Lilo and Stitch + The Ring are better than Spirited Away!!!!!!!!!!!!!

June 30, 2005 02:50 PM, Ronald Vivar said:

Daveigh, when I said that you're the prettiest girl. That's coming from the heart!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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