If you were watching any movie trailers or TV spots in the run-up to the release of the original Lilo & Stitch in 2002, you probably remember the ads for the film. At the time, Walt Disney Pictures, still basking in the residual glow of its 1990s renaissance, was seen as a historic institution that treated its catalogue with great reverence. But the ads for Lilo & Stitch blew raspberries in the face of all that tradition, with the alien experiment Stitch disrupting scenes from some of Disney’s biggest hits: wrecking a chandelier during the central dance sequence in Beauty & the Beast and pissing off Belle; surfing a wave straight into The Little Mermaid’s Ariel and knocking her off her rock; sidling up to Aladdin and Princess Jasmine’s flying carpet in a spaceship, honking his horn, and stealing Jasmine away; replacing baby Simba in the majestic “Circle of Life” opening to The Lion King. These ads — presented as teasers, TV spots, and a theatrical trailer that seemed to begin as a very serious-minded tribute to Disney’s great history — served as a delightful introduction to a character that would grow to become one of the studio’s most popular.
This sort of irreverence was new for the Disney marketing behemoth, and the idea for the ads came from the filmmakers themselves. When I interviewed him for my oral history of Lilo & Stitch several years ago, director Chris Sanders told me about how this campaign emerged. “We had received some of the early concepts for marketing the film,” he recalled. “And we were all sitting around and I mused out loud, ‘Isn’t it weird to think that from the release of this film onwards, whenever Disney does a lineup of their characters, Lilo and Stitch are going to be in that lineup? It’s almost like they’re going to invade the Disney universe.’” That sparked an idea. “Wouldn’t it be funny if we had a TV ad where you just ran the start of Lion King, and instead of Baby Simba being held up, it’s Stitch?” Sanders and his directing partner Dean DeBlois ran the idea by Thomas Schumacher, president of Walt Disney Feature Animation (and one of the film’s great champions), who told them they needed to pitch it to the marketing people.
“As a director, you don’t normally get invited to this part of the process,” Sanders said. “You have people from marketing that do this for a living.” The big marketing meeting would be presided over by Dick Cook, who became Disney chairman in early 2002. Sanders remembered running into one marketing executive beforehand and getting “the vibe that he wasn’t super stoked that we were there.” But the pitch got a big laugh at the meeting, and it prompted Roy E. Disney, chairman of the animation department and a longtime company board member (and Walt’s nephew), to muse that Stitch should turn up in other movies as well for the ad campaign.
The concept, Sanders said, had a universal appeal, especially given the precarious position the studio found itself in at the time, with several of its major releases disappointing at the box office, all while other animation studios like Pixar and Dreamworks were scoring hits. “Maybe you thought that Disney films are sort of corny or whatever, and you’re aging out of it. But then this character comes in and ruins these scenes. Well, that should be kind of interesting to you. On the other hand, if you’re still in that zone where you just adore Disney, and you’ve got the TV on in the other room and you hear the song from Beauty and the Beast or the opening of Lion King, you’re going to run in to see what the heck it is. And you’re going to be surprised to see it disrupted by this little guy and you too will be intrigued.”
To use as reference points in directing and recording these ads, the filmmakers had to recall the original materials for these scenes from the Disney archives. “I remember they dropped off The Lion King. And of course, that film is sacred. They were really not happy about leaving this stuff with us,” Sanders said. “I said, ‘Well, I worked on Lion King. It’s safe with me. If there’s a coffee stain on this stuff, it might have originally been my coffee stain!’”
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For the recording sessions, they brought in some of the original actors from the films, who seemed somewhat puzzled by the concept. “They were all professional and nice, but I don’t think any of the actors were happy about what we were doing,” he says, “because they are those characters to a large degree, so this stuff is really important to them. For Aladdin, I remember the guy who did the voice for that came in, and we pitched the whole idea to him. And there was a pause, and he said, ‘So she leaves with him?!?’ And we were like, ‘Yeah, but it didn’t really happen, it’s just an ad!’ He didn’t seem too happy.”
“The funniest one to me was recording Paige O’Hara, for the Beauty and the Beast scene,” Sanders said. “She was in New York, so we recorded her remotely, and we were just on a speakerphone. That got strange because she sounds just like Belle.” In the ad, Stitch ruins the big dance between Belle and the Beast by crashing a chandelier into the center of the great hall, prompting Belle to storm off, saying, “I’ll be in my room!” Sanders recalled, “Anyway, we pitched this thing and then there was silence. And she said, ‘So I’m mad at him?’ ‘Yes. Well, no, you’re just disappointed.’ So she did the recording and she said, ‘I’ll be in my room.’ And we were like, ‘I think you’re more disappointed than that.’ But she kept coming back with this really upbeat, happy delivery. And we kept saying, ‘No, you’re just more disappointed.’ Finally, we said, ‘Maybe try being a little mad.’ And then she hit it.”
The commercials for Lilo & Stitch really did establish a new tone for marketing Disney movies, bringing to the studio a bit of the irreverence that Pixar and Dreamworks had profitably mined in the preceding years. But Sanders said the ads also helped preserve the movie’s mystery. “Marketing wants to take the best moments in the film and put them in commercials so that people will go see the movie. And you, as the filmmaker, want to hold these things back so that when people sit in the film, they laugh and they’re surprised. You don’t want people to walk into a movie and go, ‘Yeah, I saw everything in the trailer. There was nothing delightful or interesting.’”
Disney’s marketing briefly tried something similar with the new Lilo & Stitch. A poster and one teaser featured a riff on the opening of the 2019 version The Lion King, and in another teaser, Stitch destroyed a sand version of the iconic Disney castle. They also created some posters referencing other remakes of Disney classics like Snow White, Aladdin, and Cinderella, but little else. Maybe it’s because bringing back live-action actors years after they appeared in a movie is a lot more complicated than bringing back voice actors. Maybe it’s because … those new versions of Aladdin (2019) and Beauty and the Beast (2017), for all the money they made, haven’t endured the way the animated versions did. Or maybe it’s because Disney seems more reverential about its catalogue than it was even back in the 1990s. (Look no further than … its dutiful re-creation of Lilo & Stitch.)
None of this can change the fact that, once upon a time, Lilo & Stitch was one of the strangest, most wonderful additions to the canon. Even Sanders, after all these years, can’t quite believe it. “It was so strange to me, because these are characters that we invented. Beauty and the Beast are characters that exist in literature. Lilo and Stitch didn’t exist before we came along. It still delights me,” he said. “Whenever I would go to Disneyland, there was a Lilo parking area. I would stare at that sign because I’m like, I can’t believe I’m a parking area. For some reason, that was where it really got me. I created something that’s a parking area. That doesn’t happen all the time.”
