Home, Family and the Question of Belonging in Lilo and Stitch

Text by Jane Batkin

Disney’s visions of home and family have always been damaged, with lost, adrift orphans striving to find their way in the world. The message that resonates often hints of the need to conform to the collective; fit in and you will be fine, because home is always waiting. The 2002 Feature, Lilo and Stitch, however, offers a more unanswered and unsettled vision of home, one that is about transience and unbelonging rather than security and safety. Yet the themes that serve to unbalance and provoke us, also say something so poignant about home to us. Nani, Lilo and Stitch echo: "Ohana means family. Family means no one gets let behind… or forgotten", but what do the themes of home and belonging really mean in Lilo and Stitch?

©Sarah Frimann Conradsen

Disney’s universe offers fractured worlds and representations of lost individuals, from those fleeing for their lives (Snow White, Bambi), to those imprisoned (Cinderella, Rapunzel), to those disabled temporarily or permanently (Ariel, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame). Disney adopted and adapted European folk tales, understanding the need for dark conflict within a narrative, but tailoring this for a U-rated audience. Their Westernised stories begin with an individual yearning for family / belonging or romantic love, and end with fulfilment of the same. Displacement of the hero or heroine is important, but essentially, they belong in some way; they merely need to learn how to traverse obstacles in order to fit in (for example, Pinocchio, Simba). Traditionally, Disney films platform a moral lesson to be learned before fulfilment takes place, such as learning to be responsible and less selfish (or, in the case of Penny in The Rescuers, more willing to listen to good advice). In other words, the needs of the individual do not outweigh the need to conform; society and belonging remain all important in the Disney universe. This view has altered with more recent features such as Frozen and Moana, which position the journey of the princess and her needs and wants at the centre of the narrative, and the males more on the periphery than they were previously. Home, however, remains a prevalent theme. In Frozen, Anna is anchored by the village and family “home”, whilst there is no question of Moana not belonging, as she undertakes a quest at sea to save her village. Family remains the linchpin that holds everything together.

LOVE AND ANGER

For Lilo, home is a troubled question. She likes Nani better as a sister than a mother and her attempt to incorporate Stitch into this family results in mayhem. Disney here portrays a truly broken family from within, but also from the outside, with the introduction of Bubbles the Social Worker: “I’m the one they call when things go wrong”. Home is a place of dereliction and ultimate devastation in Lilo and Stitch. It is broken, mentally, through the absence of the parents and subsequent substitution of sister for mother, and at the finale of the film it undergoes a physical annihilation by aliens. There is a clear idea of displacement and destruction that lingers long after the film is over. Family here is broken, dysfunctional and angry, whilst home is something both lost and forever transient. Ohana is sought after and remembered, but it is also crushed beneath the weight of modern life. What, then, transpires, is a story that is brave, confrontational and, at times, refreshingly “real”.

Richard Corliss notes that, despite Lilo’s anger issues, she wants to remain living with Nani [Time: 2002:67]. Anger becomes a channel for both the sisters’ frustrations, with each other and their situation. Nani despairs when Lilo is not to be found in the designated waiting area after dance practice, but her reaction implies that this is not a new dilemma. Nani’s frustration mounts to anger as she runs home, but also anxiety for her little sister’s safety. At the climax of her anger, when she is attempting to unpick the nails Lilo has fastened the door with, the social worker appears. Bubbles is a mystical figure, we learn later in the story, but at the onset he is merely the official sent to the fractured family, to see if it can be fixed, or whether it needs condemning.

Disney confronts the issue of a damaged and endangered home life for the first time in this film; it lends Lilo and Stitch a disquieting realism, that the threat is not to find home, as is the norm, but to hold it together in the face of a very real danger. Like Lilo’s homemade doll, family needs stitching together (indeed “Stitch” himself adds another layer to this theme of “fixing” family). The problem for Lilo and for Nani smacks of realism; whilst Nani is old enough to live alone, if she cannot prove herself worthy of taking care of her little sister, family will be broken forever. This threat seems so much weightier than the themes of orphans trying to find their place in the world, or of the issue of belonging to society or rejecting it. Two sisters want to be able to remain together in the face of adversity; as Stitch himself later proclaims, this family is “broken”. Lilo is not a happy child; her behaviour is at times destructive (she boils roadkill she found and doesn’t simply lock her sister out; she barricades herself in), but at the heart of the story remains one simple desire; to not break this family apart any further.