Film
Generally, Disney has never given artists the chance to express too personal a style, preferring teamwork and established stylistic tradition to authorship. Yet here we have an exception, because Lilo & Stitch was almost entirely created by Chris Sanders: his are the starting idea, direction, character design and even the voice of the main character. The result is an almost authorial film. The story is that of Experiment 626 (Stitch) escaping from the custody of the Galactic Federation and hiding on Earth in the home of a messy Hawaiian family, consisting of two sisters, Lilo and Nani, who are in danger of being separated forever by a social worker. Rarely had elements such as science fiction and contemporary scenarios found representation in Disney's animated canon, which has always been more at ease with fairy-tale or faraway settings, but 2002 proved to be the perfect recipe for one of the best-loved classics.
Art
History has given us an idea of freedom associated with the status of a citizen. In 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave a historic speech in which he spoke of the four fundamental freedoms of every human being: freedom of expression, freedom of worship, freedom from fear and freedom from want. Based on this speech, American painter Norman Rockwell (1894-1978) created four canvases for as many covers of the Saturday Evening Post, published between February and March 1943, which gave narrative depth and concrete visual embodiment to these concepts. In 2002, the Studios amplified this "incipit" of quotations by hanging the last of these canvases, the one depicting freedom from want, using it to narrate the achievement of a family's freedom to gather for the traditional Thanksgiving meal. Lilo's is a broken family, but one that with irony and sincerity makes us reflect on the meaning of friendship and sharing, because as Gaber sang "freedom is participation". A family in which no one is abandoned or forgotten, not even by those who, like Stitch, are designed to destroy.
External Links
Watch Lilo & Stitch on Disney +
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