Lilo & Stitch (2025)

2002 saw the release of Lilo & Stitch, which launched one of Disney’s most lucrative franchises that continues to see legacy support in some way, shape or form. As an anecdotal testament to this, I’ve attended the Animation Academy attraction twice on a trip the California Adventure park, where a Disney animator guides guests through drawing a character, and there was some crowd control for drawing Stitch in particular. 2025 eventually saw the franchise enter Disney’s recent push for remaking their animated films into live-action and/or very realistic CG, with the remake simply bearing the Lilo & Stitch moniker. As someone who is largely not a fan of this second wave of remakes, I was turned off enough by the announcement to not see it in a theater, but decided out of morbid curiosity to watch it anyway after it made its way to Disney+ just to see how bad it was. After satisfying my curiosity, I feel that skipping the theater was the right call on this one.

Lilo & Stitch 2: Stitch Has a Glitch

Note: This review contains spoilers for Lilo & Stitch.

When Disney releases a hit movie, it’s not uncommon to give that success legacy support in the form of a sequel (often direct-to-video but sometimes theatrical) or a TV series, often both. Such was the case with Lilo & Stitch, a film so popular at the time that it spawned a multimedia franchise with four films (including the original), a 65-episode animated series (Lilo & Stitch: The Series), a Japanese anime (Stitch!), a Chinese donghua (Stitch & Ai) and numerous English and Japanese books and video games. Although the wider franchise has faded into relative obscurity, the original film is still celebrated to this day, with Stitch himself appearing as a summon in Kingdom Hearts II and Kingdom Hearts III and serving as the subject of Disney’s annual holiday 626 Day.

In honor of this year’s 626 Day, we decided to take a look at one of the DTV sequels, Lilo & Stitch 2: Stitch Has a Glitch, animated by Disneytoon Studios. Although it’s not the second film released, despite the number in the title (it’s actually the third), we chose this one because it’s the only one not directly tied to Lilo & Stitch: The Series and is the second film chronologically, acting as a midquel between the original film and Stitch! The Movie. Unlike most Disney DTV sequels, this one does a decent job of capturing the spirit of the original film. Like most Disney DTV sequels, however, it still falls short of the overall quality of the original.

Lilo & Stitch

When Lilo & Stitch first came out in 2002 (following Atlantis: The Lost Empire), I will admit I was not too interested in it as a kid, mainly due to its advertising campaign, however I was aware enough of it and its subsequent franchise that I knew who the character of Stitch was without knowing his full backstory. However, after seeing the character make appearances in the Kingdom Hearts series as well as positive word of mouth in recent years, I decided it was time I actually gave the film a chance. To my own surprise, the movie was far better than I initially expected it to be.