Contributed by Rob N., who blogs at evilbobdayjob.tripod.com.
In the eternal struggle of boys against girls, the only hope for survival of intelligent life is for girls to win.
We’re talking lasers, aliens, boogers, gobs of earwax flicked off in restaurants, dogfights in space ships, a monster designed as a weapon to destroy worlds, plus shapely dancing girls. Lilo and Stitch has all the elements to win back boys and manly men who would normally avoid everything Disney. Sure, Stitch is cute and fluffy, but he’s also equipped with fangs, claws, spines, nightvision, nicks in his ears from past battles, tongue able to reach inside his own nose. He’s bulletproof, fireproof, lifts objects 3000 times his size and survives getting run over by two trucks. He also knows alien language so vulgar, it causes a robot to puke bolts in the trial scene.
Enjoy it while it lasts, guys, because the rest of the movie is about violent men who fail and women who pick up the pieces.
Lilo and Sith
Exhibit A in the case of violent males who fail: Dr. Jumba Jookiba, greatest scientist in the universe reduced to a common criminal. He’s able to avoid imprisonment only if he helps bring his genetically engineered Doomsday device under control.
Cobra Bubbles is a former CIA agent who became a social worker because, who knows, maybe he wanted a change of pace. Come on, what kind of real man would choose to leave the CIA? He either got booted or went soft.
Captain Gantu is a towering, sharky alien who enjoys slamming his fist on things to get his point across. Good at angry gestures, but he’s a failure when it comes to transporting Stitch to his asteroid exile or capturing Stitch for more than a few minutes at the end.
Agent Pleakley the environmentalist is hardly violent enough or manly enough to deserve male status. He fails to restrain Jumba through most of the movie and fails to bring Stitch back to the Grand Councilwoman. Even dressing like a woman (camouflage to prevent humans from recognizing him as an alien) doesn’t help Pleakley succeed like one.
Stitch manages to create a little havoc, but cuts it short before destroying any large cities. His greatest success comes when he acquiesces to women and rejects his manly instincts.
In the opposite corner, representing successful females, we have the Grand Councilwoman in charge of the Galactic Federation. This alien is not in charge of a nation or a planet or a star system. She runs the entire galaxy. Hillary Rodham Clinton would toss out her Yankees caps in a heartbeat and start wearing Alpha Centauri bloodsport caps if there was any chance the Galactic Council would elect a carpetbagger like her to lead them.
Then there’s big sister Nani. In between housework and chasing Lilo and waiting tables at the luau, Nani manages to fend off an intimidating social worker with the ridiculous covername “Cobra Bubbles.” More likely he’s big, bad Marsellus Wallace straight out of Pulp Fiction, hiding from the law or from rival gangsters, biding his time in Hawaii until it’s safe to go back to Cali. Maybe it’s just the same actor doing the voice, maybe both characters just happen to be bald with a gold hoop earring in each ear. Either way, you have to give Nani credit for standing up to him, and for confronting the aliens who capture her little sister later.
Finally in the case of successful females, we have exhibit Lilo, a lonely little girl who has a hard time making friends with humans (failure), disrupts hula class (failure), argues with her sister (failure), and is able to tame Doomsday personified (success!).
Eventually the major female characters all get their way or reach favorable compromises. Coincidence? No. Women know how to behave.
Child Protective Services from Outer Space
Reviewers and shills for the movie played up the “non-traditional family” featured in Lilo and Stitch, a young woman trying to raise her sister Lilo and hold a job. We’re supposed to give props to the creators for bringing up the topic at all in a children’s movie. Unfortunately if that’s your focus, the moral of this story seems to be that a young, single woman can’t raise a child without help from powerful aliens with advanced technology, or at least one adult male surfer. One of the highest points of the movie comes when Nani’s love interest David tries to cheer them up by taking them surfing. They’re depressed because Stitch just caused a riot on the beach and Nani got turned down for every job she applied to. Yet as soon as David joins them, everyone laughs and giggles and behaves. Instant nuclear family, just add boyfriend.
Hanging over the struggling family comprised of two sisters is the threat of authorities breaking them up. Stitch’s experience is a primer to show us what could happen to Lilo. When parents raise a child carelessly, for example teaching it to destroy large cities, then authorities take away the child. The Galactic Federation acts like Galactic Child Protective Services and takes Stitch away to be exiled on an asteroid. After watching the trial and Stitch’s escape, we know what’s at stake for Lilo if authorities disapprove of her sister’s parenting skills. Lilo will be banished from her sister to live with a foster family, maybe on a deserted asteroid.
Lilo and Sartre
For a long time after the title characters are introduced, Stitch behaves like a conniving hero straight out of a screwball romantic comedy. He fakes a relationship with Lilo because she’s useful to him, a human shield to prevent Jumba from blasting him. Gradually Stitch develops genuine feelings for her. There’s no romance, but call it a screwball friendship.
A picture book triggers Stitch’s transformation from self-absorbed monster to friend. He glances at boring books on Lilo’s shelf and tosses them aside until he finds one that shocks him into reconsidering his life: The Ugly Duckling.
Stitch skips the part of the story that everybody knows and lands on a section he can relate to. On one page, the duckling wanders alone in the woods shouting, “I’m lost.” On the facing page we see the Swan family happily recovering their misdiagnosed “duckling.” Stitch identifies with the ugly duckling so strongly, he uses it as a guidebook, trying to reenact the end of the story. He takes the picture book deep into the woods on a vision quest to call his true family. Stitch speaks the magic words that worked for the ugly duckling, “I’m lost.” He waits all night for his real family to find him and make him feel wanted.
Ironically his closest original family does find him at that point, his creator Jumba, the father who was jailed for doing such a monumentally bad job of parenting. Jumba says that Stitch has no family and he’ll never feel like he belongs. He should come home quietly and let Jumba take him apart.
What do you do if your creator gives you a purpose that seems absurd? The same thing that Jean-Paul Sartre said to do if you can’t find or believe in a creator at all: you design your own purpose. Stitch has already seen glimpses of what a functioning family is like. He had to endure a whole montage of Lilo squirting water at him as if he was a bad dog, trying to teach him how to behave, sharing snocones, surfing, hanging out at the luau where Nani works. Belonging to a family makes more sense to Stitch at this point than destroying cities or allowing himself to be snuffed out as punishment for the sins of his creator.
Stitch rejects Jumba’s violent way of life. A failure as a manly Doomsday machine, Stitch starts to succeed when his goals turn girly, focusing on family.
Lilo Versus Stitch
If they’ve been raised traditionally, boys manufacture chaos and girls strive for order. No one says, “Girls will be girls” to excuse them when they break rules.
Girls are badgered to specialize in relationships and family. Even the most loose-knit relationship requires some compromise now and then. Families have hierarchy and rules built into them. That’s why Lilo tries to bring order to her messy world from the first moment she comes on screen. She arrives to her hula class late and drips water on the stage, causing the other dancers to slip. By her way of thinking it was quite necessary. Lilo explains that she has to feed peanut butter sandwiches to a certain fish every few days, but all they had at home was tuna, which would be wrong to feed to a fish, so she had to take time to buy peanut butter so she could feed the fish, and that’s why she was wet and late. Why does she need to feed the fish? Because he can predict the weather.
Okay, that part doesn’t make a lot of sense, but it shows how Lilo sees patterns in everything. Even if she’s wrong about the fish’s secret knowledge, the subject of weather prediction fits with Lilo’s concern of finding order in chaos.
Lilo’s other obsession is taking pictures of people on the beach and taping their photos on the wall of her room. She keeps a snapshot of her family under her pillow and demands that her alien pet/friend Stitch must never touch it. Staring up at her wall of pictures, she says mournfully, “Everybody leaves.” Lilo takes pictures to remember everyone, because parents can die in car wrecks and tourists only stay a short time before going home. Given how much she values that photo of her parents, it might also mean that she takes pictures of strangers as a way of incorporating them into her family. They might not know it, but they will always be part of her photo family, properly organized instead of random strangers bouncing in and out of her life.
Lilo often brings up the Hawaiian word “O’hana” that her late father taught her. Instead of the simplistic translation of “family,” he explained that “O’hana means nobody gets left behind or forgotten.” By repeating and emphasizing that idea, Lilo shows Stitch there’s something better than chaos.
I’m not saying she’s using a wink and a come-hither look to keep Stitch under her thumb, but a different kind of feminine “wicked wiles” as Grumpy calls it in that other Disney movie. The battle of the sexes can also be about family and relationships in general. In the classic Greek play Lysistrata, women who are sick of war stage a protest in a government building and refuse to have sex with their husbands until they stop the war. There they go again, men creating chaos, women demanding order. It’s not just the act of sex that women control and extend to men, but their example as the embodiment of family and order. How can families stay together if their members and resources are being wasted in some distant conquest? If men care about their children or family or consistently getting booty, then they have to give up their dalliances with chaos and come to order.
Lilo has something valuable to trade with Stitch if he’s willing to give up his destructive nature. Imagine the two of them singing a playground song that you might hear on any given day between a competing boy and girl:
Stitch sings: “I can do anything you can do, better!“
Lilo: “Only if you destroy all things good in the process.”
Stitch: “Right. So?”
Lilo: “Try a bite of this O’hana. It’s a fruit that I got off the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and Love and Loss.”
Stitch: [Gobbles it up, recognizes his emptiness.] “More!”
Lilo: “The only way you can ever have it again is to leave the Garden of Manly Men. Families require order and you can’t keep them together if you run around creating chaos in every aspect of your life. You must get in touch with your inner Alan Alda, your inner Oprah, your inner girl!”
Stitch: “This?”
Lilo: “No, that’s outer! None of those dangly things that you keep poking out and then retracting. Inner!”
Lilo puts her hand on his heart, morphs into Jennifer Connelly from A Beautiful Mind and says, “I need to believe that something extraordinary is possible.”
You get the picture. Men have to sacrifice their wild nature in order to stay rooted in relationships. Women act as gatekeepers of the knowledge that families and order are good things, because men certainly wouldn’t know enough about it to learn it from each other. So Lilo offers her knowledge of O’hana and Stitch gives up intergalactic conquest so he can be part of the O’hana.
The Only Hope
Boys are violent. Men are violent. Hulk smash. If their skills at destroying things and places and people become better and better, then the ultimate success is to destroy everything — the world, the universe, themselves. Who wants that kind of success? Succeeding as a man in the terms we’ve been given means failing to survive.
Women succeed throughout the movie because they are traditionally stuck with the job of raising families. They come to understand order and embody order. They can help men succeed by helping them move away from chaos, move away from wild masculinity, move toward family and order.
Notice that Stitch was not captured by the Galactic Federation forces in the end. He escaped from them repeatedly and finally gave himself up because it seemed best for the people he cared about. Their violent defensive tactics could not have stopped him from destroying the universe. Only Lilo’s efforts at changing his mind and changing his identity saved the universe.
You can tell that identity is important to Stitch and the others because in the final confrontation between all the aliens and humans, the Grand Councilwoman calls our little blue hero by the original name that Jumba gave him, “Experiment 6-2-6.” He interrupts the argument to correct her: “My name Stitch.” The name that Lilo gave him. Hoping for some redeeming quality in the monster so she won’t have to banish him, the Grand Councilwoman asks with feeling, “Who are you?”
Stitch’s reply almost sounds like he’s ignoring her. “This is my family,” he says. “I found it all on my own. It’s little and broken, but still good.”
Yeah, get a tissue. Finished? He might as well have said, “My family is my identity.” The other junk about his family is a projection of how he feels about himself: “I found myself all on my own. I’m little and broken, but still good.”
You can’t seem to make up your mind here, that or I’m missing the point – is the film a sarcastic call for domestic utopia where women hold rein and set limits? Or is it that women are limited as here as elsewhere, confined to men protecting them before they can accomplish anything? I get the point about the reinforcement of traditional gender roles – and there’s something very traditional in how the order-bound and shrill Pleakley dresses as the girl of his and Jumba’s disguise, yes. But I think you’re ignoring the very important factors of David and Cobra, who you sort of warped to fit whatever you wanted about the piece, and a huge part of Lilo’s character.
David and Cobra are both very much masculine characters, and yet very much both different elements of nurturing, order, chaos, and strength. David throws fire for his job (and isn’t ALWAYS bad at it, as the end shows), but helps Nani find a job of her own. Surfing is an element of chaos in the fact that it’s a sport – it also encourages Nani to have nurturing old-fashioned FUN which she up to that moment didn’t have enough of. Cobra didn’t just leave the CIA, he became a social worker, in traditionally female-dominated profession based around something as namby-pamby as social services (and I can say this with authority because I work in the same field, though not with DCF.) But he is also a source of intimidation, demanding order from Stitch in order to prevent the chaos of the broken home. There are masculine and feminine elements to both characters.
And Lilo, this is highly important, does not just play the nurturer for her fish and her odd doll. She bites a little girl who dares to call her strange. She dreams of punishing her bullies via Hollywood voodoo. Caring for Stitch stabilizes her as well, and she is a very highly female agent of chaos. From her tearing around in a space car at the end, she hasn’t entirely given this up either – just becomes a well-adjusted kid.
Nani, willing to get her sister back, attacks the aliens with a tree branch and a few well-placed yells and they are hapless before her. There’s a time for that raw energy, the film argues, and it’s meant to illustrate her capability and likability. But it’s not that the men in this film need a woman, or the women need a man, for stabilization. People need *each other* and they are far from confined to their roles.
Sorry if it wasn’t clear. I’m not saying this is an Amazon fantasy, sarcastic or serious. Maybe I should say that having families and getting along with people and creating order are shown as good things, conquering people/creating chaos are shown as bad, and there are some gender stereotypes in our culture which seem to match up with those positions. Looking at the gender of each character in Lilo and Stitch, they seem to match those positions too, even if they aren’t extreme stereotypes in themselves.
I can’t think of any males in the movie who succeed in protecting women. If anything, Lilo and other females protect the universe by converting Stitch from a chaotic destroyer (masculine), to a bringer of order (feminine). Not that they act superficially macho or effeminate, but when you look at each character’s gender and goals, you see the males are trying to destroy the Lilo’s nuclear family and the universe, while the females are trying to prevent the destruction of the Lilo’s family and the universe.
Pleakly is a good example here because he’s superficially effeminate, with a high voice and dressing as a woman, trying to keep in contact with his mother. Even though he wouldn’t explicitly want to destroy the universe (or even a mosquito), he’s forced to work with Jumba to snatch Stitch, thereby breaking up the family. You match the goal and the gender and he’s another example of a male trying to break up a family.
David doesn’t fit my theory. A superficially masculine male, he tries to help preserve the family, the goal which is otherwise associated with females in the movie.
Cobra is hard to pin down because he seems to be trying to split up the family, while his ultimate goal is keeping the family safe. I guess he doesn’t fit the theory either. You nailed it with both of them. Even setting aside their superficially macho or effeminate characteristics, there are masculine and feminine elements in the goals of both characters.
“But it’s not that the men in this film need a woman, or the women need a man, for stabilization. People need *each other* and they are far from confined to their roles.”
I didn’t mean to say that the film presents men as needing women or vice versa. But I’m making broad generalizations about chaos and violence being generally male, a thing that males stereotypically seek, order being female, and I think the movie makes that case too in the gender and goals of most of the characters.
“People need each other” is exactly the kind of thing that I would stereotype as a feminine sentiment. It’s the kind of thing that most or all of the female characters in the film work towards (even fight towards), and most of the males work against.
I don’t think the moral is that people need to seek a balance between masculine and feminine goals. David and Cobra have superficially masculine elements, but their goals are feminine (if we take the assumption that destruction of everything is the ultimate in masculinity. Maybe that premise is what’s confusing.).
Everyone with the “masculine” goal of destroying Lilo’s family (or the universe) is proven wrong or *converted to the feminine view* in the end. No one with “feminine” goals of preserving family or working together is shown as problematic or out of balance. They’re proven right in the end. Lilo seems to be acting out at the start of the movie (biting and voodoo) because her family is broken. She stops acting out in that way as Stitch becomes more and more integrated into her immediate family. When the family headcount temporarily soars up to 4 with David, they’re all in Heaven. That part seems silly to me, because it seems to show that everyone gets happier when they have a family with a mother figure and a father figure. But the bigger a family is, the more people you have to help, the more resources you have to draw on. In as far as Lilo is adjusted, it is towards the feminine ideal of preserving family, and away from her few actions that represent the maximum masculine ideal of violence.
The biggest argument I can see against my theory is that destroying the universe, destroying families or advocating chaos, might not be the ultimate manifestations of masculinity. It’s masculinity taken to its extreme, or reduced to absurdity. Most “well-balanced” men today would theoretically reject violence and advocate for families, and they wouldn’t expect to be labeled “feminine” or less than “masculine” for holding those views. At the same time, if you draw a spectrum with Feminine at one end and Masculine at the other and ask people to pin ideas to it like “violence,” “destruction,” “family,” “nurture,” “negotiate,” “compromise,” we’d see stereotypes and archetypes played out in a fairly consistent trend.
Headlines generated by Tiger Woods
I understand that but where does it take us?
The man who is swimming against the stream knows the strength of it.
Just letting you know I greatly enjoyed reading this essay! My friend just recommended this site to me and I’ve been having a lot of fun with this being I’m an ex-English Major who misses writing papers!
I felt that your essay was a little all over the place, but that does not mean that it lacks merit. Your analysis of the characters were spot on and you gave me a lot to think about. I know my sisters and I always LOVED Lilo and Stitch and we come from a non traditional family and I can really identify with Nani immensely. I don’t think that your comparison to Lysistrata was as strong as I wanted it to be. What IS strong in this is how you see the characters in relationship to one another. Damn! You have a great writing style that’s fun to read… the humor is there. So all and all, just thank you for adding 10 minutes of joy to my morning!
Nice essay, great examination. However, I believe one of your premises is flawed: equating men with “destructive forces” and women with “cooperative forces” seems to ooze too much machismo on your part. Kim’s point about Lilo and Nani’s violence, chaos, and frustration remove them from embodying pure “order.” It seems all the characters only seek family and a sense of belonging- Lilo, Stitch, even Cobra, who is ultimately an agent of family values.
Though on the whole, great writing!
dive bohol…
[...]Lysistrata and Stitch « The Journal of Cartoon Overanalyzations[...]…
Just wanted to say that Lilo believes Pudge controls the weather and she thinks must feed him because her parents were killed in bad weather (car accident in the rain). In a deleted scene, Stitch accidentally kills Pudge and Lilo gets very angry at him, then buries Pudge. A flower blows off a tree and she says “mom” sent a decoration (for Pudge’s grave). We see Stitch looking sad with his hands over his face and Lilo gives Stitch a flower. She comes to terms with her parents’ death and forgives Stitch, realizing it was just an accident.
To be blunt, your essay is very gender-stereotyped, and female chauvinism at it’s finest. It’s no less sexist to say that women are better than men (versus men being better than women). You’ve forced some very complex characters into some very narrow stereotypes that don’t do them justice. I’m not going to go into a huge in-depth analysis here, but as a woman and a feminist, even I am offended by the level of female chauvinism you’ve shown here. It comes off as uneducated and vulgar.