Movies: Stitch in Time?

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A little girl and a teddy-bear-size monster face two big challenges. One is for the girl (Lilo) to tame her angry new pet from outer space (Stitch) while persuading a social worker to let her stay with her big sister. The other is that the Disney movie they are in, Lilo & Stitch, must make a bundle--or Hollywood could hear a death knell for the traditional animated feature. Disney's beleaguered boss, Michael Eisner, has to hope there is still profit in the hand-drawn cartoons that made Disney's name and fortune but have faded as computer-generated (CG) films have flourished.

Animators draw figures; movie execs read them. So consider these numbers, just from Disney product. The studio's four CG features (Toy Story, A Bug's Life, Toy Story 2 and Monsters, Inc.), produced by John Lasseter and his cyber-Merlins at Pixar, earned an average of $214 million; the last two averaged $250 million. As for Disney's once mighty traditional animated films, the last four (Mulan, Tarzan, The Emperor's New Groove and Atlantis: The Lost Empire) grossed, on average, just $116 million, and the last two didn't make it to $90 million. Pixar films were originally meant to supplement Disney's basic animation menu; instead they have supplanted it. The story is the same at DreamWorks. The CG Shrek scared up $267 million, while the traditional Road to El Dorado cadged a paltry $51 million.

Lilo & Stitch could bring good news to Disney and its Old Guard animators. It's a bright, engaging bauble with half a dozen Elvis Presley songs for Mom and Dad, and just enough sass--Stitch sticks his tongue into his nose and eats his snot--to keep the tweeners giggling. Lilo (voiced by Daveigh Chase) gives the usual lonely-but-superior Disney heroine a twist: she is a brat who has anger issues. And far from trying to save China or morph from mermaid to human, this Hawaiian handful has no goal loftier than the status quo--to keep living with her frazzled sister Nani (Tia Carrere).

Enter Stitch, a killing machine from the planet Turo. An unholy mix of E.T. and the Zuni fetish doll that scared the wits out of Karen Black in the never-to-be-forgotten TV movie Trilogy of Terror, Stitch was created by a mad scientist--or, as he prefers to be known, an "evil genius"--who gave the creature only one instinct: "to destroy everything it touches." Stitch escapes to Earth, a primitive planet that the Turans have allowed to exist as a "protected wildlife preserve to repopulate the mosquito." Stitch wanders into a dog pound and is adopted by the desperately needy Lilo; she figures "he used to be a collie before he got ran over." Will Lilo, herself something of a little monster, be able to turn this space Satan into a nicely domesticated Hawaiian--a ukul-alien? It's Disney Darwinism: survival of the cutest.