Lilo and Stitch: The Non-Traditional Family

            Lilo and Stitch, while entertaining, also contains many ideologies pertaining to family – more specifically, how a family should look.  The Disney film explores the lives of Lilo and her older sister, Nani, who have lost their parents in a car crash and are now doing life on their own.  Lilo, who often demonstrates that she feels alone in life, adopts Stitch, whom she thinks is a dog but is actually a newly created life form from space.  The film progresses by showing how Stitch fits, and sometimes does not fit, into their little family, while demonstrating that a family does not have to be perfect, or nuclear, in order to still have love amongst them.

            Multiple scenes throughout the movie contribute to the idea that Lilo does not have a normal family.  For one, her sister Nani has now assumed the role of her primary caregiver, and the audience views Lilo and Nani learning how to navigate this new fine line between mom and sister.  In one scene, Lilo says to Nani, “I liked you better as a sister than as a mom.” Nani, who is still relatively young, takes over parental responsibilities such as providing food, maintaining a job, etc.  When Stitch arrives, he adds to the already growing chaos.  Lilo now has a new “dog” to care for, mainly on her own since Nani is unable to focus on both Stitch and her many other parental responsibilities. Stitch, who at the start of the movie does not understand the concept of a family, makes a comment at the end saying, “This is my family. I found it all on my own.  It’s little and broken, but still good.”  This quote can be understood in two ways.

            First, it is interesting how the movie aims to portray a family outside of the traditional nuclear one (husband, wife, kids), but includes the comment of Stitch calling them “broken.”   This may be attributed to the fact that their parents died in a car crash, or that Nani and Lilo frequently butt heads, but regardless, it still alludes to the idea that if they were instead a “normal” nuclear family, they would not be broken.  However, the phrase “but still good” adds a redeeming quality.  This simple quote from Stitch contains the entire idea of the movie – that a family can still be “good” even if not traditional.

            Lilo and Stitch challenges the hegemony pertaining to families in the way that   Gloria Anzaldua’s novel Borderlands challenges the hegemony surrounding women.  According to Anzaldua, women had expectations on how they should behave, based on gender, and were also oppressed and dominated by men.  As a result, she develops the “new mestiza” that helps break down the barriers of dualistic gender norms, and the behavior that is to be expected from women.  Both Lilo and Stich and Anzaldua created a topic of discussion in which a change of thought surrounding hegemonic issues could be derived from society.