Lilo & Stitch - the Best Disney Movie for macho guys

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Two reasons why Lilo & Stitch is a great cartoon for guys:

First, the main character's older sister Nani, voiced by Tia Carrere is a big-legged woman in the style of R. Crumb. She has solid thighs, calves as big as her thighs, not quite as big as her waist. Nani looks hot. You might enjoy her more than Disney intended.

Secondly, the premise of the movie is that a mad scientist alien creates a monster as a doomsday machine, designed to destroy mindlessly, which escapes to earth and befriends a little girl. Apart from the little girl, what we have here is a perfect premise for a guy movie. Nobody gets killed, but the creature tears up enough houses, trucks and scenery to show how he could devastate whole worlds. Awesome!

Four observations or misinterpretations or something like that

1. In her first scene, Lilo takes a picture of a fat man on the beach, a pale tanktop-shaped area in the middle of his tan. Her bedroom wall is covered with photos she has taken, mostly chubby tourists. When they bring home this monster from the dog pound, Lilo tells her new friend/pet that her parents died in a car accident. Nani has been struggling to take care of Lilo, under the intense scrutiny of social workers who fear she can't handle the job. While he was still alive, their father taught them the importance of family. "Ohana means family. Family means nobody gets left behind or forgotten." Under her pillow Lilo keeps a photo of her parents, her sister and herself. She treats it like something sacred, one of the few things she asks Stitch not to touch or destroy (which both tend to happen at the same time).

The photos are Lilo's attempt to capture everyone, so none of them will be forgotten, make them into family like the fetishized photo.

2. So on the one hand, we have an orphan, Lilo, feeling incomplete because her only remaining family is her sister, as if the strains in their relationship are her fault for failing to behave. On the other hand, there is the figurative orphan Stitch, genetically engineered as a tool. The closest thing to a parent for Stitch is the scientist who created him, not an especially warm or nurturing alien.

In the lowest moment of the movie, when the sisters are about to be split up by a social worker and Stitch considers leaving his new friends, Lilo explicitly points out that Stitch's chaotic behavior may be his way of expressing anger at losing his family. She still assumes that he ended up in the dogpound after being orphaned. Lilo might be projecting the explanation for her own behavior on Stitch. But more than that, it made me think that Stitch is a bundle of chaos and destruction because he is a symbol of his destroyed family, the wrongness of his origin, being engineered instead of raised.

3. Finally, it's not difficult to pick out the theme of people surviving in dysfunctional, non-traditional families. Lilo and her sister try to form a family and have a hard time just between the two of them, but you can't get much further from tradition than accepting an alien into your family.

At one point, Nani is trying to get a job as a lifeguard at the beach. Lilo trains Stitch to perform an Elvis routine on the beach, but he freaks out when everyone mobs around him and starts taking pictures. He wrecks everything on the beach including the lifeguard stand, ruins Nani's chance of getting the job, chases away everyone on the beach, and inspires an ultimatum from the social worker.

The two sisters sit in the sand, propped against the wreckage of the lifeguard stand, looking gloomy about their situation. Their problems as a family seem insurmountable.

One of Nani's former co-workers, a boy who has asked her out before, comes up to them with a surf board and tries to console them by inviting them to surf for a while. They all paddle out into the ocean and begin to have a great time.

Maybe this is just my stupid interpretation, but it seemed like an odd coincidence that the two females keep exhibiting the problems of a non-traditional, incomplete family, until a man enters the picture, giving the family a more traditional structure. Then they all have a good time, impossible to ruin even by Stitch.

I could be wrong.

4. During the scene where Stitch and his creator Jumba are on trial before the galactic government (a ridiculously politically correct institution which won't even invade Earth for fear of killing the allegedly endangered mosquito), the leader of the government describes the horrible experiment that Jumba has made as a thing which was "genetically modified." The onscreen audience gasps in horror. The US audience in theaters, munching their genetically modified popcorn or other experimental snack, probably did not gasp in horror.

I honestly think there are some Conservatives who will be put off to the whole movie after hearing that liberal propaganda.


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