While news on the project has gone quiet, original Lilo & Stitch star Tia Carrere is sharing her thoughts on what she’d like to see from the live-action remake of the film. Carrere starred in the animated movie as Nani Pelekai, the older sister to the titular young girl who struggles to raise the six-year-old Lilo following the death of their parents in a car crash. Lilo and Nani’s life is turned upside down when the alien creature Stitch crash lands on Earth, with the two initially taking the destructive creature in as a pet before learning of a need to hide him from a mad scientist and Galactic Federation.
Alongside Carrere, the cast for Lilo & Stitch included Daveigh Chase as Lilo, co-writer/co-director Chris Sanders as Stitch, David Ogden Stiers, Kevin McDonald, Jason Scott Lee, Kevin Michael Richardson and Ving Rhames. Hitting theaters in Summer 2002, Lilo & Stitch was a smash hit, scoring rave reviews for its originality and departure from the traditional Disney format, and was a box office hit, grossing over $273 million against its $80 million budget. The film’s success would spawn a franchise that included a sequel TV show and two spinoffs, Stitch! and Stitch and Ai, as well as an in-development live-action remake.
While speaking with CinemaBlend for the original film’s 20th anniversary, star Tia Carrere shared her thoughts on the in-development Lilo & Stitch live-action remake. The Nani voice actress revealed her wishes for the project, hoping to see a more authentic roster of performers on the film’s soundtrack than seen in the original film. See what Carrere explained below:
“I wish I could have sung more songs… I wanna do a racking guitar song. There’s so many great songs [on the soundtrack] and I got to do that on my Grammy-winning Hawaiian music, so it’s fine. It worked out all OK in the end, but I would’ve liked to have seen more local people, including myself, performing on the soundtrack. I had my one little scratch track of ‘Aloha Oe’ that I sang at eight o’clock in the morning without anything to it, but it was poignant and pure and I’m just glad that I was included with that.”
The original Lilo & Stitch soundtrack did include a couple of songs from Hawaiian performers, both of which were written by the film’s composer Alan Silvestri and Mark Keali’i Ho’omalu and performed by the latter with the Kamehameha Schools Children’s Chorus. Despite this, the film’s soundtrack was still primarily composed of non-Hawaiian performers, with five songs from Elvis Presley and two of his songs re-recorded by Wynonna Judd and the A-Teens. Though many of Elvis’ songs have been linked with tropical settings, given some of his films being set in Hawaii, it’s understandable Carrere would hope for a more authentic approach to the soundtrack for a live-action Lilo & Stitch remake.
With Disney having better delivered culturally authentic projects in recent years, including the acclaimed Polynesian-based Moana, it does seem likely Carrere’s Lilo & Stitch live-action remake wishes could come true. That being said, it’s difficult to determine what’s to come from the film at all as no updates have come for it since Crazy Rich Asians director Jon M. Chu initially signed on to direct, though some reports claim he has since departed to focus on Universal’s Wicked movie adaptation. While audiences await further word on the remake, they can revisit the original Lilo & Stitch streaming on Disney+ now.
