If that’s Australia, the release date is 19 September 2002, according to IMDB.com.
Well, we saw both … and liked them both as well.
Lilo & Stitch - I agree that it was more of a family movie than a kids movie. Read a comment comparing it to Aladdin. I LOVED the trailers. FYI: ! They can be seen online:
Some random thoughts:
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Lilo’s picture collection was quite amusing - a nice twist on “let’s take pictures of the natives!”
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Speaking of which, is Disney gonna get slammed for their (for lack of a better term) ethnic portrayal of native Hawaiians? (i.e. not stick skinny) I hope not - reminded me of Gaugin [sp?] - and even the Anglos were drawn the same way.
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I though the “Baywatch” lifeguard was exactly that - a reference to the TV show!
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The watercolor backgrounds were awesome! I hope this trend will continue.
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The voice acting was very well-done. I’m a bit ashamed I didn’t recognize David Odgen Stiers … and Mr. Pol picked up on Ving Rhames before I did.
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I’m glad I wasn’t the only one to notice David’s low-riding shorts… mmmmm!
There were a couple of throw-aways that I was a bit disappointed with: [possible spoilers…]
- Lilo’s mention of Punch the Fish controlling the weather… wish they’d done something with that later in the movie.
Lilo attacking the little red-head girl when she called Lilo “weird” – that seemed a bit overdone. A better comment would have tied in her family situation & made the attack more reasonable. (I know, Lilo’s not necessarily supposed to be reasonable!)
Cobra Bubbles - first of all - the name :rolleyes:. Second of all, too much of a coincidence that he’d been the one to convince the Federation of Earth’s protected species status?
Pleakey and Jumba posing as humans - um, hello? Pleakey’s only got one EYE… and Jumba has FOUR… they shouldn’t have been able to sneak into the luau.
Anyone else catch the Norman Rockwell ‘Thanksgiving’ photo?
And according to a couple of animators I spoke with, the directors are in the luau scene.
If you have a chance, get the recent back issues of the Disney magazine (the Reader’s Digest sized ones at the supermarket checkout counters) - they were running flipped cartoons: read the book one way for the backstory on Stitch’s creation, and flip the book over to read some mini stories on Lilo. I wish they had been included in the movie, but Michael Eisner wants animated movies to be 90 minutes long.
What a stupid-head.
Yes, he looks like Max. But to me, he also looks like The Maxx!
According to this article, animators deliberately “chubbed up” the characters to counter the previous Disney model of hourglass feminine figures like Ariel and Pocahontas. I don’t think it’s a particularly “ethnic” portrayal, but more of a real representation of what all people actually look like.
And that one poor guy never got to eat his ice cream… 
Are you kidding - it was great! The artwork style was one of the best parts of the movie, and I seriously doubt any native Hawai’ian would complain that their people were portrayed realistically, i.e., just like everyone else in the world.
It was quite an unusual voice for Stiers - not easy to pick up. It’s not like Cogsworth, which was fairly close to his real voice.
Indeed, and Jason Scott Lee is a honey, too!
Well, Nani did mention how ugly she was. Maybe it was dark, or his wig obscured him or something. (Then again, it is just a cartoon… )
Esprix
I haven’t seen it yet, but speaking of 2-year-olds, we were walking out of the movie theatre last night, and a woman asked another woman’s 2ish daughter if she liked Lilo & Stitch, and she said
“YEAH!”
So the woman asks the child what Lilo & Stitch did?
and the kid says
“They tore up everything!”
Is that true?
Sounds like 2 thumbs up to me!
“Blue punch buggy!”
Esprix
(“No punchbacks!”)
Originally posted by Osiris
My wife was pretty happy with the attention to detail in the pidgin and hula. It may not have been perfect, but she felt it was much better than you usually get in movies.
So what sort of details and nuances in each would someone knowledgeable look for or notice, as opposed to Joe Tourista who has only Hollywood films as a guide?
If you want to hear an absolutely dismal representation of Pidgin, seek out North Shore, whose only redeeming factor is the inclusion of real-life professional surfers doing their thing on the North Shore. Race the Sun, with Jim Belushi and Halle Berry, featured some local kids slingng the lingo around. Of course, there were also real-life Hawaiians on shows like The Real World and Road Rules.
Let me just say that Blue Crush doesn’t seem as if it’s going to be much better in that regard.
I can’t speak for the hula, but as far as pidgin goes, I recommend Pidgin to da Max (available, surprisingly enough, at Amazon), a childhood classic that everybody who grew up in Hawaii read at one point or another. ::sits and waits for other HI dopers to prove him wrong::
Movie Pidgin just always sounds too polished and perfectly pronounced. Too clean. But I guess that makes sense. They do want people haven’t grown up with it to understand what they are saying afterall. So it only slightly annoyed me rather then grating on my nerves as it usually does.
KK, I remember when that came out. Everybody was talking about it, it seemed. Some kid would bring it to school and everybody would want to borrow it. So yup.
Esprix is right, David is a honey. And Noni is also a major babe, and not in the usual Disney way. I loved her big muscular legs…and her boots!
I don’t know enough about hula to judge the accuracy of the dance scene, but it wasn’t the usual awful exploitive dusky-island-maidens-with-coconut-bras stuff, thank goodness.
My wife is one of the moderator’s for the soc.cutlure.hawaii USENET newsgroup and I recall her talking about a regular (this is a couple of years ago) would would write short stories in pidgen and post them to the newsgroup. They were pretty popular. If interested in seeing pidgin (which won’t help much with understandnig how it should sound) you might try to find some of those.
I myself learned nothing of pidgin during my two years in Hawaii, so I have to take my wife’s word on the pidgin in the movies.
The pidgin was great, and the “stupidhead” part was hilarious to me. Whenever I imitate my friends’ or neighbors’ pidgin, it always includes a couple of “stupidheads”. I also liked that they used the word ‘wen’ = “What we wen run ovah?” or whatever the line was.
For those of you interested in reading pidgin, if you find any books by Lois Ann Yamanaka lying around, check those out. I’ve skimmed through one her books, and found the pidgin parts to be pretty accurate. Of course, if you’ve never heard pidgin spoken, you won’t be able to make much sense of it written. I had to speak some parts out loud before I realized what was being said.
I was most impressed by how the film got the small-town Hawaii thing right. At least one of the buildings (it was in Lilo’s pictures) reminded me of some of the old shops in Haleiwa, the Big Island, and Kauai. I also liked how they handled the ethnic diversity in Hawaii. There was a good mix of native Hawaiians and Asian folks and haole people and blacks.
I had my reservations about this movie when I learned it was set in Hawaii-- I thought they’d totally butcher everything and waste a potentially very cute movie. But they didn’t. I liked how they didn’t make Hawaii look like some prehistoric town where people went about in grass skirts and lived in huts and ate coconuts, bananas, pineapple, and roast pig for dinner.
And Stitch was horribly, disgustingly cute.
SO and I saw it yesterday…
and all I can say is that I’ve never laughed nor cried harder during any movie for a long, long time!
I wanna have a Stitch! Waah!
Thanks for the info on pidgin. Can anyone comment on the hula?
AudreyK (or anyone), what is a haole people?
Lilo & Stitch was amazingly funny…seemed to take about 45 minutes. My kid was laughing so hard, he almost peed himself. And I was cracking up at different spots altogether. Great flick!
[slight hijack]When I went to Hawaii as a dumb tourist (with my mother, no less) in 1990 or so, I brought back copies of “Pidgin to da Max” and “Fax to da Max.” Those books still crack me up! And at least I can understand Pidgin when I hear it…I heard a report on Hawaiian Pidgin once on NPR radio, and I understood just about all of it! Wow…now if we can only get those guys to put out “French to da MAX” I’ll be all set.
[/slight hijack]
PS- Haoles are the white folks. (Thanks, Pidgin to da Max!!)