Lilo & Stitch

In Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois’s 2002 animation, Lilo lives in Hawaii with her older sister Nani and adopts a badly behaved dog that is really an escaped genetic experiment. The pressure comes less from the alien hunt than from a caseworker’s power to end Nani’s custody: the science fiction plot interrupts a family case rather than driving it. The Elvis records are structural: rebuilding Stitch as a model citizen runs entirely on Lilo’s record collection. The third act was not always this one. Stitch originally hijacked a Boeing 747 at Lihue Airport and the plane scraped buildings through downtown Honolulu; after the September 11 attacks, with the film near picture lock, the 747 became Jumba’s ship and the chase moved into the mountains of Kauai, most of the character animation reused. Disney had not painted a whole feature in watercolour since Dumbo in 1941, so art director Ric Sluiter ran seven months of workshops and consulted Maurice Noble, then in his eighties, whose coarse sea salt trick gave the lava rock its texture. A good fit if you want the custody threat carrying the tension while the alien chase waits. Not for anyone after the crisp digital Disney surface of the late nineties, since watercolour paper grain shows in nearly every background.