I say give the boys at Disney credit for trying to clean up their act. A few years back, after half a century of cloning Snow White and Cinderella, they decided to stop exalting the sweetness, purity, beauty, spirit, and pluck of Caucasian girlhood and put together instead a parade of copper-colored heroines including a Native American, a Moor, an Arab, a Chinese, and now ... a Native Hawaiian! The classic Disney heroine at the center of LILO & STITCH is not little Lilo but rather her overworked older sister Nani, a sweet, pure, beautiful, spirited, and plucky young woman of color who's trying to stay employed, raise the perversely rebellious Lilo by herself, and also, of course, find true love.

And give the boys at Disney extra credit, sez I, for trying in recent years to make a few films that actually dare to deviate a teeny-weeny bit from the standard Disney plot formula and all of its familiar conventions. A good example is THE EMPEROR'S NEW GROOVE, a madcap, antic, jazzed-up movie that's noticeably more hyper kinetic in its style and tone than traditional Disney.

LILO & STITCH has a measure of originality too, largely because the story combines four disparate elements: the attempt by the Galactic Federation to recapture Experiment 626 (a little bioengineered monster of destruction who has escaped from the lab), the lush warmth and bright colors of Hawaii, the music of Elvis Presley, and a custody battle with Social Services. Out of this unexpected mixture the movie builds a clever extended joke: the little bioengineered monster of destruction meets his match when he's paired up with a little human monster, Lilo, who disobeys her sister, throws tantrums, and deals with her friends by biting them and punching them in the face.

An iota of originality is also evident in the artistic look of the film, with soft watercolor backgrounds and characters who look slightly more cartoonish than usual, more akin to early Warner Brothers animation than classic Disney, so much so, in fact, that I kept expecting Bugs Bunny to sidle into the picture and say, "What's up, doc?"

Unfortunately, LILO & STITCH is totally conventional in other ways, specifically in its style of humor (bursts of slapstick action for the kids, "witty" references to pop-culture icons for the parents), its predictable power surge of sentiment (graph the emotional manipulation curve for every 90-minute Disney movie ever made, print the curves on transparent plastic sheets, stack the sheets, hold the stack up to the light, and you'll experience the optical illusion that you're looking at only a single curve!), and its insistent moralizing (in this case, about the importance of family members supporting and helping each other -- called ohana in Hawaiian).

Little Deuteronomy got a big laugh out of LILO & STITCH and would probably give it a 4 or 5, but his grumpy old grampa can't go that high.

My rating on the Watson scale: 3

Lilo & Stitch
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