What Happened to the Fish?
Lilo and Stitch celebrated the twentieth anniversary of its United States theatrical release last year. Director Chris Sanders and nostalgic fans reflected on the film’s celebration of sisterly love, its protagonist, and its Pacific Islander representation. The film turned into a franchise, including 3 direct-to-video sequels and a TV series. Conversations about BIPOC representation in movies have expanded since 2002, which seems to have sparked a renewed interest in the film. A live-action remake was announced in October 2018. It will be the first post-renaissance Disney film to receive the live-action treatment.
YouTube offers an interesting rabbit hole. Don’t worry, this one won’t turn you into a Men’s Rights Activist. It will instead introduce you to a medley of songs from across cultures, genres, and decades. The Lilo and Stitch soundtrack fuses Elvis, traditional Hawaiian sounds, and aughts teeny bopper cover songs. When I stumbled across the song “He Mele No Lilo” accompanied by its corresponding movie clip, I took notice. This movie has aged well.
The sequence where we first meet Lilo hits different as an adult. An orange fish clutches a sandwich in its mouth. Cut to a seven-year-old girl swimming in what must be 50 feet of ocean water. Lilo swims to the surface, gasps for air, and realizes that she’s late for hula class. She swims to the beach. No one waits for her there. She was swimming in the ocean deep unsupervised. Was she even within earshot of a lifeguard? The absence of an adult or supervisor at the beach stands out to twenty-first century audiences. This movie came out well past the era of latchkey kids (and even they were rarely at such a risk of drowning). Lilo throws on her hula skirt and top and runs to rehearsal.
When I was in Grade 12 Video Production class, I tried to create a sequence where a character walks from one setting to another. The teacher-a sarcastic former film crew member who I admittedly idolized- gave an exaggerated yawn and muttered “walking…. walking… walking.” In other words, ‘this is boring.’
He wasn’t wrong. It’s hard to get a walking-to-a-building scene right. One of my undergrad writing profs advised her students, “never start a story with the protagonist entering a building.” Lilo and Stitch offers a rare example of a great walking-to-a-building scene.
As Lilo emerges from the Pacific Ocean, dripping wet, she grabs her knapsack. She runs toward her destination- then stops. She can’t resist the tourist flaunting the obvious undershirt tan line who just wants to eat his damn ice cream cone. She snaps a photo of him with her early-2000s disposable camera and the first of many ice cream scoops drops to the floor. With no embarrassed parent to tell Lilo to stop being rude, we learn who she is- adventurous, creative, and alone.
The ice cream man offers comic relief, and a remnant of an earlier draft of the Lilo and Stitch script- a draft that included more explicit commentary on tourism, exoticism, and race in Hawaii.
The rabbit hole continues! If you listen to enough songs from Lilo and Stitch, YouTube feeds you deleted scenes from the movie. The pencil-sketched renderings offer plot lines once known only by folks included in test screenings.
In one deleted scene, Lilo hangs around town with Stitch, and tourists bark at her, “Hey, speak English? Which way to the beach?” Lilo and Stitch follow them to said beach. A woman yells, “hey look, a real native!” Lilo screams, “attention tourists!” She points out the tsunami sirens and convinces the tourists that the proceeding tsunami drill is authentic. The scared tourists run from the beach. Cobra Bubbles, Lilo’s social worker, watches the scene from afar, raises an eyebrow, and gives a disappointed smirk. Lilo hangs her head and mutters, “If you lived here, you’d understand.”
Back to the walking-into-a-building scene. Lilo arrives at her hula class and thinks she can sneak in unnoticed and join her place in the line of dancers. Wrong! Water trails behind her. She didn’t get a chance to dry off properly at the beach. Her classmates slip and fall. Lilo locks eyes with her instructor. He hasn’t been fooled. He knows that she was late. He asks why she’s all wet.
Gee, hula instructor, what more can I say? I’m late for class because, as I’m sure you know, today is Thursday.
Lilo recounts that she went to make a peanut butter sandwich for Pudge the fish, as one does on a Thursday. But her household ran out of peanut butter. She asked her sister what to do, and Nani, presumably exhausted from working in the service industry and raising a child on her own at nineteen-yes that’s confirmed to be her age-suggested that Lilo make a tuna sandwich for Pudge. Of course, Pudge does not deserve to be subjected to cannibalism, so Lilo had no choice. She had to go to the store, buy peanut butter, and disrupt the routine that would have made her punctual for hula class.
Lilo’s instructor shows compassion. He doesn’t mind that she was late. But he asks why it’s so important that Lilo feed Pudge his weekly peanut butter sandwich. Well, duh! Pudge controls the weather.
Two Pahu Drum players and two adult hula dancers, there to accompany the children, look at each other. Lilo and Stitch has a lot of deleted scenes. Why keep these non-verbal exchanges between characters who have no dialogue in the movie’s eighty-five-minute runtime? Because the looks capture what they understand that the kids don’t. Seriously, this movie hits differently as an adult.
It’s implied that Lilo’s parents died in a motor vehicle collision during heavy rain. Lilo wants to please he who controls the weather so her family may avoid future tragedies.
This brings us to the trope, ‘What Happened to the Mouse?’ from tvtropes.com.
“What happened to the mouse?” occurs when a minor character, action or very minor plotline is suddenly dropped from the story for no apparent reason, without any real explanation about what happened to it, and without a resolution.
There are several main reasons this happens: in movies, the most common is that scenes are excised in editing, but references to them still remain elsewhere in the film
The trope’s name refers to a scene in The Last Emperor in which the title character violently throws his beloved pet mouse offscreen. There’s no sound of the mouse hitting anything, but it’s never seen again, leaving its fate ambiguous… in the theatrical cut, anyway.
“Pudge controls the weather”, like the ice cream man photo shoot, establishes Lilo’s character, but the-all important Pudge disappears after that scene. He’s never seen or mentioned again, at least in the cut of the film that made it to theatres.
In another deleted scene, Lilo introduces Pudge as her ‘other best friend’ to Stitch. She lifts Pudge from the lagoon, leans in to kiss the fish on the lips, then extends him to Stitch, instructing him to do the same.
Stitch smacks the fish out of Lilo’s hands. “What’s wrong with you?” Lilo shrieks. As Pudge propels through the air, Lilo grabs him. So does a flock of seagulls. Lilo engages in a tug-of-war with the seagulls. She begs Stitch for help, but he sits idle. Lilo manages to snatch Pudge away from his predators, but it’s too late. He’s dead.
Lilo carries Pudge’s corpse to a graveyard. Stitch follows her. Lilo keeps her eyes low as she digs a grave for her friend. Stitch watches her, then he looks up and sees the graves where Lilo’s parents lie. Flowers hang over their tombstones.
Lilo places flowers on top of Pudge’s grave. Stitch wanders away from the graveyard. Distraught, he buries his face in his hands. Lilo finds him and comforts him. “You didn’t do it on purpose, did you?”
It’s not clear when in the film the scene was supposed to take place. Writer Dean DeBlois and director Chris Saunders (who doubled as the voice of Stitch, inspiring a generation of kids to imitate it on schoolyards everywhere) cut the scene from the film after they received feedback from test audiences.
“Too dark,” they lamented.
DeBlois spoke to Animation World Network, six months after the film’s release. He talked about the concept of Ohana and chosen family in Hawaiian culture.
“We wanted to find… I guess poetic ways of getting those ideas across without hammering them. Like the death of the girls’ parents, for example. We didn’t want to spend a lot of time dwelling on it because we knew it was a dark issue. It was about balance, trying to balance the whimsy against the weight. We discovered the pacing of the story as we went on. At one point in development, our act two dipped into a very dark place for a long time. We had several sequences back-to-back, which were just low and depressing in spirit. We needed some levity to balance them because we had to get the audience ready for what they were going to go through in the third act.”
DeBlois went on to explain that they substituted a dark scene with the “Hawaiian Roller Coaster Ride” surfing sequence. For those who haven’t seen the film in a while, the “Hawaiian Roller Coaster Ride” bit occurs toward the end of the second act, before Cobra Bubbles advises Nani that he will likely have to take Lilo away, sparking Stitch’s redemption arc.
The live-action Lilo and Stitch remake faced production hurdles in 2020 due to pandemic shutdowns. Directors and screenwriters previously attached to the project have quit- including John M. Chu, director of Crazy Rich Asians and the upcoming sequels. On July 14, 2022, Disney announced that the film will be directed by Dean Fleischer Camp, who helmed Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, nominated for Best Animated Feature at the 95th Academy Awards. Chris Kekaniokalani Bright will write the screenplay.
It’s unknown if the dark, tourist-critical deleted scenes will get a new life in an adaptation, but you can check them out on YouTube at the links I included in this article.
