How Maia Kealoha's imagination brought Stitch to life on the Lilo & Stitch set

Did you ever have an imaginary friend growing up? Maia Kealoha did, but for her, it was a little bit different. Every day, her friend would change shape.

“Sometimes, I wouldn’t even have to use my imagination,” Kealoha, 8, tells The National. “One day he’d be a puppet. On another he was a dog. Some days he was just a ball, or a piece of tape, or a rock. A stick. And sometimes just hands.”

Remarkably, none of this was difficult for the Hawaiian actress, who stars as Lilo opposite her imaginary friend Stitch in the new Disney remake of Lilo & Stitch. Because before she auditioned for the role, this was how she filled her time.

“I didn’t have siblings growing up,” Kealoha explains. “So I had to use my imagination for everything. That’s why it was always easy for me to imagine Stitch was there next to me.”

Sydney Elizebeth Agudong, who plays Lilo’s older sister Nani, was in awe of her younger co-star.

“She learnt so quickly, and she was so present. The imagination that she had was there from the start, and it only just got better and better and better. We all learnt a lot from her. She’s remarkable,” says Agudong.

While things may have been simple from Kealoha’s perspective, they were anything but for director Dean Fleischer Camp.

“Honestly, of everything we had to do for this movie, I think the hardest thing was bringing Stitch to life,” says Fleischer Camp.

On set, Kealoha was always his first priority. The Hawaiian native was six at the time of filming, and before she landed the role, she’d never acted. Forging chemistry between your lead stars is hard enough when they’re experienced – this was a challenge no one could be ready for.

“But we wanted to make it feel real not just for Maia, but also me and the crew and everyone. And there was no one-size-fits-all solution to do that.

"Every day was filled with new challenges. Sometimes we’d even have to use Maia’s acting coach crouched in the corner. And yes, sometimes it was this real dog named Dale, who’s a French bulldog with zero training or expertise,” says Fleischer Camp.

“Who caused Stitch-like chaos at all times,” producer Jonathan Eirich chimes in.

And for Fleischer Camp, getting it right was deeply important. On a professional level, this was the biggest opportunity of his career. Before Lilo & Stitch, he’d directed only one narrative feature – 2021’s acclaimed Oscar and Bafta-nominated hit Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, a live action-animation hybrid based on his book and short film series. But on a personal level, he cared about this story too much to mess it up.

“It’s always been my favourite animated Disney film, ever since it released in 2002,” says Fleischer Camp. “It’s just so different from everything else. It has this very unusual, unique art style by Chris Sanders. And it’s such a unique blend of story. Other than the fact that it’s about an alien who crashes down on Earth, the drama is very real – it’s about two sisters who are struggling to stay together, fighting off social services in their native Hawaii.

“So what we really wanted to do was enhance those elements. We wanted to make it this really raw experience about these sisters being torn apart – diving into the emotional depth of it. But at the same time, we wanted maintain Stitch’s expressiveness, charm and humour.”

And making Stitch feel natural in a naturalistic world while maintaining his exaggerated cartoonish design was something that almost caused Fleischer Camp to pull his hair out.

“I had to bring in people that were close to the movie, such as original director and designer Chris Sanders, who was around to help us. And Alex Kupershmidt, who was the lead animator on the original, was a huge help. I’d send him stuff, and say ‘something doesn’t look right’. And he’d say, ‘the tail is two inches too far to the left’, and we’d draw over it and somehow that would fix it,” says Fleischer Camp.

The resulting film is 23 minutes longer than the original. And while it maintains the shape of its source material and recreates some of the film’s most memorable scenes verbatim, it does a lot to flesh out the characters and heighten the drama.

Some of the changes have transformed scenes that were previously somewhat inert. In the original, for example, it’s explained that Stitch can’t touch water, because it will increase his molecular density. This leads to a scene near the beach where he must be rescued. In Fleischer Camp’s version, the development of the characters and the shift in perspective deliberately turn that sequence into the new emotional peak of the film.

“We want audiences to sob in their seats,” says Fleischer Camp. “That was the goal. We want blubbering.”

“I’ve seen plenty of funny movies in my life that sort of taper off by the end. The ones you really remember, I think, are the ones that give you a gut punch towards the end,” says Eirich.

“I like to trick people into crying in public spaces,” Fleischer Camp adds.

For Kealoha, the emotional scenes were just as easy as all the rest. Why? Because she cared about Stitch just as much as Lilo does.

“Stitch is my best friend. I didn’t have to pretend,” says Kealoha.

Lilo & Stitch is now in cinemas across the Middle East