I thought Ohana signify family , and family means nobody gets provide behind … including Captain Gantu .
🚨 Warning: Major spoilers ahead. 🚨
There’s a significant change in Disney’s live-actionLilo & Stitchthat some people might have difficulty coming to terms with, and I get it.
There’s Lilo and Nani.
Of course, there’s Stitch.
Pleakley and Jumba are present.
There’s even the Grand Councilwoman!
But there’s no Gantu.
🚨 Spoilers Ahead! 🚨
In the live-actionLilo & Stitch, the main antagonist is no longer Captain Gantu, but instead Jumba (Zach Galifianakis), hellbent on capturing his rogue experiment for his evil galactic domination plot.
Remember when Captain Gantu capturedLilo and Stitch, and instead of letting Gantu die after he rescued Lilo, Stitch saved Gantu, too, and we all started crying? Yeah, that’s not happening in this version.
Director Dean Fleischer Camp explained toEntertainment Weeklywhy they made this big change from the original movie. “Something that live-action films do by virtue of taking place in reality is that they are already more grounded,” Dean said to the publication. “If you have a story likeLilo & Stitchthat does actually have this pretty terrestrial drama between the sisters and staying together, you can actually do them a greater service in a live-action movie. You can make those relationships deeper, hopefully more emotionally resonant.”
We’ve seen these types of changes before inDisneylive-action remakes. Remember when Mushu and Cri-Kee were completely missing from the live-actionMulan?
In addition to Gantu’s omission, there was a big change with Cobra Bubbles being a very intimidating social worker and an obvious homage to Ving Rhames’sPulp Fictioncharacter, Marsellus Wallace.
“You end up thinking about how it is a very different experience to see an actual 6-year-old girl potentially being threatened with being torn from her caregiver sister after grieving the loss of their parents,” Dean said. “That is a very different kind of responsibility from a filmmaking perspective than what you can get away with in an animated film.”
In the new film, Cobra Bubbles is just a CIA agent, and his role as Lilo’s social worker was given to the new character Mrs. Kekoa (played by Tia Carrere, the voice of Nani from the animated film).
“If the dramatic stakes of Lilo is that she’s going to get separated from her sister, then you need a person who actually services those stakes in a credible way,” Dean continued. “You can get away with that being Cobra Bubbles in an animated film — a 6-foot-5 huge dude with ‘Cobra’ tattooed on his knuckles is somehow a social worker in that world.”
Big, tall, scary dudes like Gantu and animated Bubbles are apparently “too much live-action.”
So, if there’s no Gantu, that means that somebody has to take his place as the movie’s antagonist. “One of the things I loved about the original is that up until Gantu arrives, there is no villain that is just a villain,” Dean said. “Gantu arrives and it turns into a more conventional movie. I thought there was a nice opportunity here for [Jumba] to turn and become the villain in the third act.”
You might want to know that Gantu did exist in the live-action version at one point, but Dean elected for the change, according to producer Jonathan Eirich. “We did have it in at one point,” he toldEW. “In part because you’re following certain aspects of the original movie and you’re like, ‘Oh, well of course Gantu has to be in this. It was really to Dean’s credit that he challenged the idea of, ‘Well,doeshe have to? Could it be somebody else who has a more personal connection?'”
Changes are expected in the live-action remakes ofDisney films, but since Gantu is a character who plays a huge part inthe Lilo & Stitchuniverse, I feel it necessary to defend his presence in the series. Gantu may have been an antagonist to some degree in the 2002Lilo & Stitch,but was he really a villain? Not necessarily.
Gantu represented the original movie’s conflict of obedience, law and order, and doing things “by the book.” He was following orders, something every character (besides Lilo and Stitch) did in the original movie.
Now, Dr. Hämsterviel? That’s a real villain right there. IYKYK.
Justice for Captain Gantu!
Read the full interview with Dean Fleischer Camphere.
What do you think about the changes toLilo & Stitch?
