Friday night I went to see Disney's newest animated film. For those of you on another planet it is called Lilo & Stitch. I say that because I would think its hard to miss the advertising campaign. Stitch appears to be everywhere. I wanted to just share my first impressions of the film with you. Well I know my former cinema professors would not like this write up, but hey its the geek's site not a film paper, so here are my thoughts:

I really enjoyed the film. I thought it had a great mix of humor and music. The story kept moving and did not seem to lag at all. It is not an academy award type movie, but it is extremely entertaining and worth seeing. The visuals in the film for the most part are great. The watercolor backgrounds really give a relaxed feel to the film. The Elvis songs work perfect in the movie and help to define the characters and scenes. There appeared to be enough humor for both adults and children alike. Almost everyone I saw seemed to really enjoy the movie. Stitch really seems to steal most of the scenes he is in. He always seems to do something strange or out of the ordinary that just makes you laugh.

A couple other scenes that jumped out at me were the ones with Lilo and her sister "fighting". These seemed really real to me. I was kind of surprised to hear some of that in a Disney film with their lead characters calling people things like "stupid head". I thought it worked perfectly to define the characters and set the scene, it just jumped out at me as being very "un Disney" script writing. I guess everything evolves over time and some of it is really needed to make the characters more believable.

Box office thoughts: Well its a tough call. I think the film will do fairly good, but the problem I see is the jam packed summer movie season. There is a big film coming out every week (two or three some weeks). So it will be easy to get lost in the jungle. It will be interesting to see how it plays out.

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