INTRODUCTION
Hello and welcome to The Monster & The Child, where childhood studies and monster studies collide! I am Dr. Kathleen Kellett, and this video is all about children and their aliens. What can narratives about kids encountering unknown life forms tell us about childhood in society? Unsurprisingly, I think the answer is a lot! We will be looking at two big blockbuster explorations of this topic with Steven Spielberg’s E.T.: The Extraterrestrial and Disney’s Lilo & Stitch. Both of these films contain an interesting jumble of resistance and reproduction of mainstream American social constructs of childhood. I’m particularly interested in how they position young kids as the natural counterpart to an alien organism. The notion of first contact is something that captures many a human imagination, and both of these films posit that the aliens themselves should kind of hope that that takes place with one of the younger members of our species. So what is it that makes childhood and alienness go together?
Before we get into that, just a reminder that I have various monster education programs open for enrollment if you would like more of these discussions in your life! My adult Monster Book Club meets on the last Wednesday of each month. For October, we are reading A Cosmology of Monsters. If you are a teenager from ages 14-18, I would love to get my teen Monster Book Club started, as well. Once we have enough participants there, I have an array of great books to read. You can find more information about these programs on my website, themonsterandthechild.com. You can also learn about Youth Monsterology, my five-month teen educational mentorship program that will be launching in the spring. If you’d like to sign up early or just sign up for more information and updates, you can also do that on the website! Meanwhile, I also have a Patreon, where members get additional reaction videos and polls for future video topics. They are the reason that I am talking about Lilo & Stitch today! So if you are interested in any of these monster communities, please check out the links in the description. I would love to see you there!
All right, back to our aliens. Why would a child be better at understanding an extraterrestrial intelligent life form than an adult – or, perhaps more accurately, why might adult storytellers imagine that this would be the case? Aliens inspire both wonder and fear. It’s hard not to feel awe when considering all the potential ways that stars and planets could align to create forms of life that we can’t even imagine. What different biological laws may govern them? What senses could they have that we couldn’t even comprehend? What forms of intelligence might outstrip our own? That’s often where the fear comes in, when we consider the potential vulnerability of our small blue marble. But even this fear is a form of anthropomorphism, or at least terrestrialism, maybe? That’s not a word, but what I mean is the fear of potential alien aggression is projected from our own concepts of how life forms can be aggressive here on Earth, very much including humanity. Ultimately, it’s impossible not to project ideas about our own species onto our conceptions of what another sapient life form may be. Consequently, our stories about aliens tell us a lot about how we actually think about ourselves.
As it turns out, we think about ourselves in very confusing and contradictory ways, and those ways are very much dependent on the social positionality of whoever is doing that thinking. Both E.T. and Lilo & Stitch certainly bear that out. Here we will find a whole mess of ideas that romanticize childhood while also acknowledging the frustrations and righteous anger of children’s disempowerment, as well as storylines that criticize the nation-state – but maybe not too much. If you’re looking for pure ideological consistency, you’re not going to find it here, but what these stories will provide us is an opening to examine the idea of the human child as an alien creature, and vice versa. What are the forces that, in a more literal sense than is usually intended, alienate kids? And how do they make connections with others – and the Other – not despite, but because of these forces? Let’s tilt our heads back to the stars and consider.
“YOU DON’T KNOW HIM”: ELLIOTT AND E.T.
A solid thirty years had passed since the last time I saw E.T. I remember watching it on TV at my grandma’s house as a small child and my reaction to it being mostly distress. E.T. himself kind of freaked me out, but not enough to not still be sad that he does, in fact, go home at the end without his BFF, the human child Elliott. Aside from that half-remembered semi-unpleasant viewing experience, most of my knowledge of E.T. came from cultural osmosis – which, to be fair, accounts for quite a lot of knowledge, since E.T. is a bona fide American phenomenon. It was a massive blockbuster upon its release in 1982, and in the nearly 45 years since, it has permeated pop cultural consciousness. “E.T. phone home” and the image of a flying bicycle against the moon are probably as recognizable as Elvis (to foreshadow some pop culture we’ll be getting into in our next section). As is sometimes the case with cultural touchstones, I think that its fame can obscure some of its genuine weirdness as well as its opportunity for analysis. So however long it’s been since you engaged in this story, let’s try to figure out what made it resonate so much with the American public.
The full title of this film is E.T.: The Extraterrestrial, which is the same kind of annoyingly redundant as Spielberg’s later film, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, which I talked about in the video up in the corner. I did not care for that one, and there are definitely strands of Spielbergian beliefs about childhood that crossed the decades from one film to the other, but I do think that the earlier E.T. is ultimately more successful, though that doesn’t mean that there aren’t plenty of things to critique. We start this film not with the child, but with the monster, for monsters are what aliens are, at least until we understand them better. We don’t get a good look at the alien at first, but we do establish that his spaceship has landed on Earth and he is exploring. He studies terrestrial plant life, as his long-fingered hand picks up sprigs of evergreen. But though the alien and the ship are in the wilderness, their presence has not gone unnoticed by the dominant species of this planet. We see the tires of cars and the legs of humans as they chase after the small, shuffling alien. On the ship, another creature stands in the doorway, and its heart glows a deep red, prompting the same response in the alien explorer. This unfortunately provides a beacon for the humans to follow, and ultimately, the explorer must hide as the ship leaves without him.
Meanwhile, a group of teenagers congregate in a suburban home and boss the little brother of the household around. Ten-year-old Elliott is sent to fetch the pizza from outside, and he notices that someone or something appears to be in the family’s tool shed. He tosses a baseball inside, and moments later, the ball bounces out again. As Anthony Magistrate notes in his article “Innocence Unrewarded: A Note on E.T. and the Myth of Adolescence,” this is the first instance of E.T. participating in one of the archetypal touchstones of American suburban childhood: a game of catch. Elliott alerts his family, but when they check outside, nothing is there (though some of the dropped pizza has been eaten). The teen brother, Michael, teases Elliott about a “goblin.” No one takes Elliott seriously, even when he later comes face to face with the “goblin,” at which point the viewer gets their first clear look at the alien, who Elliott immediately screams at upon seeing, which prompts the alien to scream, as well, and they mutually run away.
Probably most humans, if they saw a living creature that they had never before encountered, would feel that initial alarm. But what Elliott does next defines his character and establishes the thematic throughline of the film: he goes out into the hills on the outskirts of his Southwest town to try to find this newcomer again, fueled by curiosity instead of fear. He leaves Reece’s Pieces out to lure the creature, and he notices an adult figure also poking around, his face obscured from the viewer. That adult lacks Elliott’s imagination and generosity, so the childhood-associated candy wins the day, and the alien takes the “innocent” bait.
Before the two beings reunite, Elliott has to endure more dismissiveness from his mother, Mary, and teasing from his brother. His younger sister, Gertie, aka baby Drew Barrymore, is mostly there to be cute. We learn that Elliott’s absent father is in Mexico with his new girlfriend, which Mary is very upset about. Michael, distressed by his mother’s distress, angrily asks Elliott why he never considers other people’s feelings. This is unfair, since Elliott himself is obviously sad about his dad not being there, and no one tries to comfort him. Already at 10, it’s supposed to be Elliott’s job to consider adult emotions before his own, something that Michael has internalized, as well. Magistrate points out that this makes Elliott’s initial game of “catch” with E.T. even more significant – underlined by a later scene where Elliott ties missing his father to specifically memories of baseball – as E.T. begins to fill the holes in this family.
Indeed, the alien provides the judgment-free connection that Elliott obviously craves. He returns to the house to give back some of the candy that Elliott had set out for him. Elliott, no longer afraid, uses the candy to bring him inside and hastily hide him in his room. The alien begins to mimic Elliott’s actions, scratching his nose and waving his hands in a mirror image of the young boy. Elliott is delighted, but then quickly becomes tired and falls asleep as the alien observes him. Now, the film doesn’t spell out everything having to do with Elliott and E.T.’s bond, so it’s kind of up to us to interpret what’s going on in this scene in light of later revelations. As we saw in the beginning sequence with the glowing hearts, this creature is part of a species in which organisms share an internal biological connection and communication system. At some point, this specific alien establishes a version of that bond with Elliott, and my reading is that it starts to happen right here, with the alien mirroring Elliott’s movements. Regardless of the plot specifics, though, what we are clearly immediately shown is identification between child and alien.
The next day, Elliott proceeds to show the alien his stuff: his Star Wars toys, his pet fish, and his candy. So the first experiences of human culture for this alien lifeform are specifically children’s culture. It’s kind of the opposite of a “take me to your leader” situation. Based on the peaceful observations of plants, this alien species doesn’t seem concerned with aligning with terrestrial power, so bonding with a child, who has no access to that, makes sense. Elliott doesn’t ask anything of the alien other than to share in his world.
When Elliott’s siblings get in on the secret, Gertie and the alien iconically also scream. Michael and Elliott hastily cover up the situation to keep it secret from their mom, which the two boys have an immediate unspoken understanding about. They don’t have a bad relationship with their mom, so this pact isn’t necessarily about her specifically. They just seem to know that getting adults in general involved would not mean anything good.
The alien finally gets his nickname of “E.T.” when he reveals that “home” is out the window, up in the sky, and then somewhere among the model planets that he is able to levitate, to the kids’ wonder. He also has the ability to bring dying potted plants back to life, once again connecting him with nature – also the domain of the capital-R Romantic child. Indeed, E.T. is shown to be childlike in many ways. Left to his own devices when the kids are at school, he explores his new surroundings, including the children’s toys, the TV, a bunch of food, and a variety of beverages. It’s an interesting thought experiment: would we be like children again if we were introduced to a whole new culture, a whole new world? Is it the newness that makes childhood “childhood” – innocence in its aspect of ignorance – or is it the attitude of curiosity and openness? This movie, due to its Romanticism, suggests both.
This sequence is also where we get the first look at the extent of E.T. and Elliott’s embodied connection. When E.T. drinks soda, it’s Elliott who burps in class. When E.T. drinks alcohol, Elliott begins to experience the effects of drunkenness. Serendipitously, I guess, it’s frog dissection day in science class. This is a really important scene, but before I get into it, just a few things: were ten-year-olds really out there dissecting frogs in the 80s? Granted, I never had to dissect a frog in school – which, thank god, because I love frogs – but this level of technical difficulty in elementary school just seems unusual to me, but let me know if I’m wrong. More pressingly: was anyone ever actually out there killing the frogs on site? Surely science classes even in 1982 were purchasing their frogs pre-formaldehyde-ed? Chloroforming them to death in front of a bunch of 10-year-old students is not only deranged, but also surely dissecting them fresh instead of preserved would be considerably messier? For my own peace of mind, I have to believe that this was just a decision made for the movie.
Because, of course, the by-proxy drunk Elliott leads the class into rebellion to set the frogs free. Not only do the frogs resemble E.T., but this is also a key scene in contrasting child/alien compassion with adult scientific coldness. We never even see the teacher’s face: he is just a tall, looming figure talking in a monotone about the sharpness of the scalpels. His unfeeling rigidity fails in the face of chaotic child/alien embrace of all life. As Magistrate writes, E.T. has “produced a heightened awareness in the child of freedom and life – values not exclusive to only the human sphere” (224). The newness of the world and the alien’s and child’s ignorance about “how things work” imbues them with a purity that the corrupted adults lack. All of that is very Romantic childhood, very essentializing of childhood innocence, and therefore very indicative of Western hegemonic social constructions of childhood. At the same time, it can also be read more subversively, because Elliott sees the frogs as fellow small oppressed creatures, suffering under rigid adult categories and determinations of worth. Child is student, who must sit quietly and obey instructions. Frog – and alien – are test subject, who must be taken apart to be classified. Elliott, intertwined with E.T., who is himself a scientist, rejects that destruction is necessary for understanding. Elliott arguably understands the frogs better than the teacher, because he has compassion for them, and therefore can see the similarities between them and us as life forms. This scene is both reproducing stereotypes of Romantic childhood and critiquing adult systems of power in a way that upholds children’s knowledge. This is a real “two things can be true” kind of movie, thematically speaking, which can make it frustrating for me but also interesting to analyze.
However, the film also pulls its punches at times, and we start to see that tendency here, too. Elliott is dragged out of class and his mother is called as she returns home from work, bringing Gertie home from preschool. She discovers the empty beer cans that E.T. drank, and on the phone, she is told that Elliott was in school “intoxicated,” and that would probably be a fairly big deal, consequence-wise, for Elliott? But that’s the last we ever hear of it. We don’t see how his mom reacts when she picks him up or even if he (truthfully) denies drinking the beers. Mostly, the fact that Elliott was drunk in school is played for laughs and triumphant frog-releasing cheers. So we’re setting up the ways in which children are disempowered in an adult-run world, but not quite willing to see that through to how it would actually affect a real kid, either at school or at home. To me, that’s always something to look out for: what limitations do we often find in adult-written (and directed, and produced, etc.) media that is ostensibly about the structural relationship between adulthood and childhood?
In lieu of any narrative fallout from the previous scene, we instead see E.T.’s next big childlike development, courtesy of Gertie. She watches educational preschool TV with him and he begins to repeat the letters on the screen. Gertie then takes matters into her own hands and teaches him important words, including “E.T.” and “Elliott.” She also, just for fun, dresses him up in feminine clothing, which Elliott objects to being beneath E.T.’s dignity, because gender. But it is little Gertie who imparts human communication onto E.T., and she who interprets his first attempt at the iconic line – “E.T. home phone” – as his greatest desire: “E.T. phone home.” Communication and storytelling are coded both childlike and feminine through Gertie, as E.T. also observes her mother reading “Peter Pan” to her – specifically, the part about believing in fairies to keep them alive. This connection is the subject of Patricia Read Russell’s “Parallel Romantic Fantasies: Barrie’s ‘Peter Pan’ and Spielberg’s ‘E.T.: The Extraterrestrial.’” E.T., like Peter and Tinkerbell, can confer the power of flight, is associated with embodied light, and is only comprehensible to children. Plus, he does, in fact, literally need to be kept alive through connection with others. For all his impressive powers, like healing Elliott’s “ouch” with his glowing finger, E.T. is faltering without his people nearby. Michael picks up on his labored breathing, but Elliott says “we’re fine.” Michael also clocks this: whatever happens to E.T. is happening to his brother, too.
But the kids have a plan: they collect a bunch of random electronics from the garage, and E.T. begins to put them together into a radio that can “phone home.” Here we see a bit of E.T.’s dual role as fellow child and surrogate dad. The masculine garage things had been abandoned since the departure of Elliott’s father, but now E.T. gives them purpose again. But then the kids smuggle E.T. out of the house on Halloween, as he poses as Gertie as a ghost. Again, the alien slots right into these cultural touchstones of childhood, as we of course see next with the flying bicycle. It’s nostalgic, it’s Romantic, it’s very American. But beneath the spectacle, there is also the acknowledgment of real loneliness within childhood. Though Elliott helps E.T. set up the radio, he also asks if E.T. really has to go home. He says, “I could take care of you. I won’t let anybody hurt you. We could grow up together, E.T.” That last sentence really shows that Elliott perceives E.T. as a fellow abandoned child. They both need someone, and Elliott thinks that they could fill this need for each other. But E.T., ultimately, does have somewhere he belongs – it’s just not here. When his people don’t immediately show up after sending the signal, E.T. points at his chest and says “ouch.” He’s not just speaking metaphorically. Elliott staggers home the next morning, but E.T. is still out in the woods. When Michael goes to find him, E.T. is passed out in the creek, his brown-gray skin turned a horrifying patchy white.
The kids are now officially in over their heads, so they try to bring in some adult help by revealing E.T. to their mother. Michael tries to get her on the kids’ level before he lets her in on the secret. He calls her by her first name and repeats what Elliott asked of him when he first showed him E.T.: “Just swear the most terrific promise you can make.” He’s trying to get her to react with the openness that the three siblings showed, instead of a kneejerk adult aversion, but to no avail. She sees both E.T. and Elliott lying ill on the bathroom floor, and Elliott says, “We’re sick. I think we’re dying.” E.T., meanwhile, reaches out to Mary and says “mom.” Linked with a child as he is, he just wants to be comforted in his hour of need by a parent, but Mary cannot see the similarities between the alien and the child. She scoops the kids up and runs away while E.T. wails and Elliott cries out, “You don’t know him!” This is the film’s major indictment of the adult orientation towards difference: adults don’t take the time to learn and understand something new. And “something new” can and often does mean children themselves.
When Mary tries to escape the house, she finds a full-on astronaut looming at the front door. The government has located E.T., and they have the house surrounded. Police and scientists in gas masks descend upon the haven of home with bio containers and plastic sheeting. The space of family and childhood is invaded and quarantined. Soon, E.T. and Elliott are isolated by the medical team, while the rest of the family is questioned. Michael struggles to explain the link between his brother and the alien. When one of the scientists asks, “He thinks his thoughts?”, Michael corrects him: “No. Elliott feels his feelings.” To the scientists, this might not be a big difference, as the outcome is more or less the same: the alien and the child are showing synced brain activity. But to the kids, this distinction is all-important. This isn’t about scientific knowledge exchange. It’s about the literal glowing heart of emotion: embodied affect and pure, pre-verbal love. So: childhood, not adulthood.
Again, that’s very capital-R Romantic, very essentializing, very in line with the prevailing social constructs of a more morally correct version of human life associated with childhood. As you surely know if you watch this channel, those constructs often actually work against kids, even though they seem to be positive. For one thing, that’s how we get children treated as irretrievably Other: literally more alien than human. This is not helpful when it comes to adults being able to communicate with kids and create just systems for and with them. But also: this film critiques that adult failing, even as it upholds the stereotypes that fuel the adult-child divide. Because another major downside of the construct of morally pure, emotion-fueled childhood is a dismissal of children’s knowledge as knowledge. They feel feelings, and adults think thoughts. Yet Elliott is positioned as more knowledgeable about E.T. than all the fancy scientists. His feelings are knowledge, and they aren’t a lesser form of knowledge than hard science. So once again, this film reproduces and resists the same social constructs of childhood simultaneously.
As the doctors work on Elliott and E.T., Elliott yells at them, “You have no right to do this. You’re scaring him!” Now, one of the things about the legal category of childhood that makes me most upset and angry is children’s lack of bodily autonomy and specifically medical rights. So this fury at the medical team for running tests and attempting interventions that neither E.T. nor Elliott consented to has the potential to be a really powerful indictment of adultist systems. However, the film once again pulls its punches a bit. Elliott says, “Leave him alone. I can take care of him,” but, well, that’s just not true. No one can do anything to help E.T., because the problem is the distance of his people. So though Elliott keeps insisting that the medical team are making things worse, by the inner logic of the film, they aren’t, really. We also have a token good adult, a scientist – revealed to be the main figure we’ve seen chasing around after E.T. for the whole movie – who begs for Elliott’s help in treating E.T. because he, too, has been “wishing for this since I was 10 years old.” He tells Elliott, “I’m glad he met you first,” acknowledging that E.T. would not have had such a warm, unquestioning acceptance if an adult had encountered him. Then his whole time on Earth would have been the poking and prodding that’s taking place now, but even though Elliott screams, “You’re killing him!”, none of the other scientists are really that bad? Again, they aren’t killing him; he’s dying anyway, and they are actually putting all of their medical efforts into saving his life, even though that’s not working. They all look genuinely sad when E.T. severs his connection with Elliott and then flatlines. So the critique of the unfeeling adult world is very present, but the film seems unwilling to really vilify any adult in particular, at least among the scientists.
It’s worth pointing out, though, that even this mild chastisement of adult priorities proved to be too much for some adults at the time. E.T. was actually banned for under-12s in Scandinavian countries when it was in theaters, on the grounds that it had provided a “negative image of adulthood because it portrays a society composed largely of individuals who are the enemies of children” (223). Magistrate wryly notes that this ban didn’t actually “do away with the social tensions that alienate [children] and make them rebellious” (223). Any critique at all of the adult-run status quo is going to get some so-called experts up in arms – and this decision was influenced by the psychological organizations – so probably my desire for a mainstream all-ages film to give a full-throated condemnation of adult abuses of power is somewhat unrealistic, since apparently we can’t even handle a relatively gentle “hey, doesn’t it suck when adults don’t listen to kids?”
Elliott says a tearful goodbye to E.T. in a speech that is fully designed to yank on those heartstrings, but the key part of it is the Peter-Pan-like statement, “I’ll believe in you all my life.” Just as Elliott closes the glass coffin/specimen container, E.T.’s heart glows that deep red. The real reason for this is that his people are on their way, and their increasing proximity has revived him. However, the obvious implication is that Elliott’s belief in him is also a powerful life-giving force, unlike the emotionless adult science. Russell explains how the film uses its Pan allusions to highlight the theme of callous adulthood ignoring “the intuitive wisdom of youth” (28). Again, to a Childhood Studies scholar like me, that notion of “intuitive wisdom” is a double-edged sword, because it is essentializing in ways that aren’t really helpful, but also here is coupled with a critique of adults not acknowledging children’s knowledge, which I’m down with. I know I keep repeating myself, but both things are true. Russell points out how E.T. copies Peter Pan’s depiction of the adult world as “inept and, usually, cruel” (28). The children need a magical figure like E.T. or Peter to give them enough power to literally fly away from adult rules.
And that is exactly what they must do with the newly revived E.T., since if the adults find out that he’s not dead, they’ll want to keep him. The kids break out of the quarantined house with the help of the neighborhood kids on bikes waiting outside. As Russell points out, they are this film’s version of the Lost Boys. These kids are crude and prone to bullying behaviors, but ultimately still on the right side, which is at least somewhat of a subversion of childhood innocence. Elliott and siblings steal a government truck and careen away, and if I had been a bit skeptical of the too-mild critique of the scientists, at least this film does portray the police as fully anti-childhood, as they are willing to shoot at the escaping kids, exposing, Magistrate argues, “the undercurrent of violence that lurks beneath the surface” of the suburban world (224). We then get the full flying kids on bikes shot as they escape to the forest clearing where the adults can’t easily follow (so again, that alien-child-nature connection). Mary and Good Scientist do arrive there with Gertie before E.T. departs in the spaceship that waits for him, in a reward for being the two adults who at least a little bit learned to listen to kids. (Mary, at this point, has been won over by the love her kids have for E.T.) E.T. tells Gertie “be good” – and I think he means this in a rather different way than adults do when they tell kids to behave – and he tells Michael “thank you.” Then it is time to depart from Elliott. E.T. asks Elliott to come with him, and in turn, Elliott asks E.T. one more time to stay, but they both know that neither can fulfill that request. They agree: “Ouch.” E.T. lights up his finger and touches Elliott’s head, saying, “I’ll be right here.” He takes the potted plant that he revived and then the ship leaves, trailing a rainbow, as everyone watches with grief but also wonder. And that is where that cultural milestone of the alien-and-child narrative ends.
J. Hoberman, in “Laugh, Cry, Believe: Spielbergization and Its Discontents,” offers a very harsh but not entirely unfair read of Spielberg’s patterns as a filmmaker. Hoberman writes, “Astoundingly attuned to mass-audience psychology, he is at once ruthlessly sadistic and cloyingly saccharine” (121). We can see both of these tendencies in the ending: Elliott’s best friend and literal soul-connection is gone, his dad’s still absent, the power that the alien conferred onto him has left, leaving him once again a socially powerless child. But: Good Scientist is now enmeshed in the family unit – so new dad, anyone? – and Elliott at least got his whole family to capital-B Believe in the Romantic child’s emotional embrace of the new and unexplained. We get that full God-like Noah’s Ark rainbow to clinch this new way of being in the world. But also, no adults face any consequences for their old way of being. Hoberman accuses Spielberg’s moral approach to filmmaking as “acutely self-conscious, if not downright anxious to do the right thing” (122). Which is perhaps how you wind up with a movie that wants to be really staunchly on the side of oppressed childhood without really offending any adults – with the exception, apparently, of 80s Scandinavian psychologists. I can’t say I was much more narratively satisfied this time around than I was 30 years ago, but there sure is a lot of revealing information about perceptions of childhood in society baked into this film, so at least I’m analytically satisfied? Probably not what the heartstring-pulling Spielberg was going for, but I’ll take it.
Since E.T. is such a major pop cultural touchstone, many stories since then have explicitly engaged with it as an intertext, and that includes Lilo & Stitch. Fittingly enough, this is also a big “both are true” movie when it comes to regressive and progressive themes, though I’ll tell you right now, it does pull on my own personal heartstrings a lot more. So let’s fast forward twenty years to see what the child and the alien look like in the hands of the most unstoppable juggernaut of children’s media: the Disney Corporation.
“HE’S GOOD. I CAN TELL”: LILO & STITCH
If my first memory of E.T. is being unsettled in my grandma’s living room, my first memory of Lilo & Stitch is being annoyed by its ad campaign. I was 12 in 2001, so no longer automatically interested in every new animated feature, but very much a regular viewer of the Disney Channel. The commercials for Lilo & Stitch, as millennials like myself may recall, were constant. They involved Stitch showing up in various iconic Disney movie scenes – Ariel singing on the rock is the one that I remember most – and ruining the moment with his chaos, to the irritation of the established Disney characters and also of me. I therefore did not see the film when it came out, though luckily the ad campaign didn’t backfire as hard with the general populace, since this was one of Disney’s weird experimental films of the era that did quite well. I didn’t wind up watching it myself until after college, at which point I was surprised to actually really like it.
This anecdote, to me, is kind of a microcosm of the film in general: despite the best efforts of Disney, it manages to have a lot of interesting and genuinely moving things to say. But Disney does put in that meddling effort, so it doesn’t get away thematically scot-free. Not for nothing, my first bullet point in the notes I took this time around is “Russian accent for Jumba,” so like, we are still working with some cultural shorthand and stereotypes, at the very least. Jumba, for the uninitiated, is an alien who is on trial before the United Galactic Federation for unauthorized genetic experimentation, which has resulted in the lifeform Experiment 626. When the Grand Councilwoman asks, “What is that monstrosity?”, Jumba indignantly responds, “Monstrosity? What you see before you is the first of a new species.” A new species intended entirely for destruction: he has been created to raze cities and create chaos. The Councilwoman says, “So it is a monster,” and Jumba is forced to concede, “Just a little one.” And, yeah, by all definitions of monstrosity, 626 fits the bill. He is outside all preexisting boundaries, including species boundaries; he breaks all cultural norms; and he is antagonistic to, in this case, not humanity, but alien civilization. He’s also smart, and though he is banished to a distant asteroid, he manages to escape his captors, biting the alien captain in the process, who asks, “Does this look infected to you?” 626 commandeers an escape ship and crashes on Earth – specifically, in Hawai’i, the home of our other eponymous character, six-year-old Lilo.
Over a Hawai’ian language song, we watch Lilo swimming in the ocean, giving a peanut butter sandwich to a fish, then running to her hula class – but not before stopping to snap a photo of a bemused and sunburned tourist on the beach. Lilo radiates joy as she dances, but unfortunately, she is still dripping wet from the ocean, which causes the other dancers to slip and fall. When the instructor asks why she’s all wet, she launches into an explanation of how she had to go buy peanut butter to bring to the fish, Pudge, because all they had at home was tuna, and she couldn’t give tuna to a fish! Why did she have to do all that? Well, you see, “Pudge controls the weather.” Another of the dancers, a little white girl named Mertle, calls Lilo crazy, prompting Lilo to immediately leap on her and start biting. After Lilo is pulled off, Mertle asks the exact same question as the alien captain: “Does this look infected to you?”
So there’s a ton to unpack just in that like three-minute sequence. Working backwards, the “does this look infected” line obviously draws a direct connection between Lilo and 626. Within their social worlds, they are both Othered to the point of monstrosity, so much so that contact with them is seen as a source of contamination. Then there is the Hawai’i of it all, which is absolutely central to reading this film. In this introduction to her character, the Indigenous Lilo has two interactions with white people: one marked by spectatorship, and the other marked by violence. Lilo’s relationship with tourists is a deliberate way of turning the usual relationship of spectatorship around: she exotifies them before they can do the same to her, and she puts their photos on her wall like wildlife photography. Later, she says, “Aren’t they beautiful?” So one of the very first things that this movie does is contrast the perception of Hawai’i as a tourist paradise with its reality as Lilo’s home. And then we have Mertle, participating in Hawai’ian culture by taking hula lessons, but feeling superior to an actual Hawai’ian child, dismissing her beliefs as crazy. It’s Lilo’s reaction, perceived as more aggressive, that gets punished – she has to sit out the rest of the hula class, while Mertle can continue. So Lilo gets sidelined from her own culture due to her monstrosity in the eyes of the whiteness that consumes that very culture.
If this all sounds surprisingly anti-imperialist for Disney, then, on the one hand, yeah, maybe, and on the other hand, let’s see. Lilo, despite being instructed to wait for her older sister at the community center, follows the other girls after the lesson to try to play dolls with them. The problem is her doll is called Scrump and has an oversized green head. Lilo explains that she made Scrump herself, and she came up with a story for the too-big head, which is that bugs have laid eggs in it. Mid-explanation, the other girls, led by Mertle, all leave. Lilo throws Scrump down in anger, but then tenderly backtracks and picks her back up with a hug before dejectedly heading for home. Katie Perea analyzes this film through a queer theory lens in “Touching Queerness in Disney Films Dumbo and Lilo & Stitch.” Lilo is not performing childhood femininity correctly here, and she is ostracized by the “mean girls” because of it. Perea notes that the “mean girl” is itself a figure that upholds negative gender stereotypes by being “gendered with characteristics that are intentionally absent in the main character” (7). So here’s our first instance of “both are true”: Lilo subverts gender roles, but Mertle reinforces them in the “girls are vicious” sense. Now, in real life, peers very much do police one another’s gender performances in childhood, so I’m not saying this dynamic is unrealistic. Mertle’s whiteness is also important here again, in terms of colonial gender roles being forced on Indigenous people. But it is still worth pointing out that sometimes the narrative tools that are used to critique gender stereotypes, like “mean girls”, can in and of themselves play into them.
In any case, when Nani, Lilo’s sister, shows up to collect Lilo, she is horrified to find that she left by herself. Nani races for home, hoping to intercept Lilo before the scheduled social worker visit – because Nani is not only Lilo’s sister, but also her sole legal guardian, though she herself is still only in her late teens. When she gets home, she sees that Lilo has boarded up the door, and she argues through the dog door for Lilo to let her in. Lilo, iconically, says, “Leave me here to die” as she wallows in her bad day by playing Elvis music. So, when the social worker arrives, suffice to say that a bad impression is made. The social worker is a Man in Black type called Mr. Bubbles, who intones to Nani, “I am the one they call when things go wrong.” Nani’s guardianship of Lilo is on thin ice, and the sisters fight with each other after he leaves. After they’ve calmed down, though, Lilo sadly asks, “We’re a broken family, aren’t we?” Nani admits, “Maybe, a little.” It’s not an exact repeat of the line, but it’s reminiscent of how 626 is “just a little monster.” This is all pretty heart-wrenching stuff, made even more so when Nani hears Lilo praying for “an angel” in lieu of friends: “The nicest angel you have.”
Smash cut to 626’s crash landing site, as he snarls silhouetted against the glowing wreckage! The United Galactic Federation sends Jumba to track down his wayward creation, accompanied by the one-eyed Pleakley, who is there to make sure Jumba doesn’t break any interplanetary laws. They can’t just destroy Earth, since it is a wildlife preservation for the endangered mosquito. These two plotlines converge upon an animal shelter. 626 was taken there after being hit by a car, and the next day, Nani is there to get Lilo a dog as a hopeful cure for her loneliness. 626, who is very hard to kill, like all good monsters, has revived and freaked out all of the actual dogs, who are hiding when Lilo goes in the back. 626 sees his opportunity: Jumba and Pleakley are stationed outside with their plasma cannons, but they aren’t allowed to harm innocent lifeforms, so if he can leave with this little girl, then he’s in the clear. 626 shapeshifts his body to at least somewhat resemble a dog – he at least sucks in his extra limbs – and goes out to greet Lilo, who is instantly smitten. This, incidentally, was the subject of a short I did, so if you want to hear more about just this scene, you can head over there.
Nani and the animal shelter employee are horrified by Lilo’s choice and try to tear the two of them apart, much like Elliott’s mother did with her kids when she first encountered E.T. But Lilo is completely undeterred, even when the employee says, “We have better dogs,” and Nani asks if Lilo is sure. She says, “Yes. He’s good. I can tell.” She names him “Stitch,” which the employee starts to say isn’t a good name, but Nani redirects her. Despite Nani’s difficulties in performing the role of guardian, she does know and not only love but like her sister’s weirdness. Two dollars are paid, the paper is signed, and the rechristened Stitch now belongs to Lilo. Jumba, for his part, is thoughtful about this turn of events. There are no big cities on this island, so Stitch’s experimental programming is moot. Jumba muses, “626 was designed to be a monster, but now he has nothing to destroy. You see, I never gave him a greater purpose. What must it be like to have nothing, not even memories to visit in the middle of the night?”
What it’s like at first is total chaos, as Stitch engages in various acts of delinquency like stealing Mertle’s tricycle, which is delightful, and attacking the disguised Jumba and Pleakley at Nani’s hotel luau workplace, which is less so. The latter gets Nani fired, and she shoots back, “Who wants to work at this stupid fakey luau anyway?” Nani, to make a living, has been forced to participate in a tourist-centric facsimile of her culture, and that setting turns its back on her as soon as she is not convenient for them. In “From Outer Space to Paradise? Remapping Hawai’i in Lilo & Stitch”, Iris-Aya Laemmerhirt explains that, historically, media from the imperial core – so, like, definitely including Disney – portrays Hawai’i as paradisical islands while “suppressing the dark side of colonial Hawai’ian history” (83). This film doesn’t entirely dispense with that, from its lush art style – watercolors like Dumbo, as Perea notes – to its ultimate vision of multicultural unity. But, despite reproducing some of the romanticization of the Hawai’ian islands, Laemmerhirt argues that Lilo & Stitch also “criticizes American colonial practices and the forced annexation of the former independent kingdom, thereby rendering the island state still a highly contested space.” Nani’s plight is the key throughline for this theme, as she is rejected from her tourist industry job and left without resources as an Indigenous young woman. Not only that, but Mr. Bubbles threatens that if Nani is not able to get a new job in three days, he will take Lilo away. Notably, he does not help her do this or provide her with resources. Nope, she’s on her own, and if she fails, then the government takes over and takes everything.
Stitch is also part of this ultimatum: Mr. Bubbles says he has to become a “model citizen.” Nani wants to just get rid of Stitch, but Lilo won’t hear it. She reminds Nani of what their father taught them about family, ‘ohana. To them, it means “nobody gets left behind or forgotten.” So Lilo sets to work turning Stitch into a “model citizen” using the best template she knows: Elvis Presley. And here’s where we get into some potentially dicier thematic implications of the film. In “Family, Race, and Citizenship in Disney’s Lilo & Stitch”, Emily Cheng argues that ultimately this is an assimilation narrative, for Stitch and by extension for Hawai’i. She writes, “While Stitch is mandated to become a model citizen, in a way, the movie also portrays Hawai’i as a ‘model’ national space” (125). Elvis is a big part of that. His cultural association with Hawai’i is very much in line with the romanticized paradise vision popularized in the mid-20th century as it became a U.S. state. He also, obviously, is a major American pop cultural identity marker. Now, there could be something in the fact that Stitch’s attempts to emulate Elvis to be a “model citizen” utterly backfire, costing Nani job after job as he creates chaos throughout the island. The strongest potential critique would be in the final tableau where Stitch, in full Elvis garb, performs on the beach, but then gets spooked and starts reacting erratically and violently when the tourists mob him. But this would be an implied criticism at best. Elvis himself is never interrogated as a cultural figure within the Hawai’ian context, since Lilo unquestioningly loves him. Instead, Cheng argues that he is used to prove Lilo’s own essential Americanness. So that certainly complicates the critiques of other aspects of Americanness – that is, the government and the tourist industry – that we may find elsewhere in the film. Sure, there may be things worth tweaking, the film seems to suggest, but we’re not going to go all in against American culture.
At this point, it’s worth noting that Stitch is not actively trying to sabotage Nani or even to create the chaos he was programmed to generate on purpose. He was obviously moved by Lilo’s definition of ‘ohana, and he has begun to question where he belongs. He makes her explain the Ugly Duckling to him, and he identifies with the title character. Lilo also explains to Stitch what happened to her parents: they died in a car accident on a rainy night. This throws the opening sequence into a heartbreaking new light: of course Lilo would create rituals around controlling the weather after a trauma like this. Lilo is a weird girl for sure, but she has her own logic and ethics. It’s just that other people don’t take the time to understand her.
I really like this as a way of building on the child-as-alien idea. In E.T., Elliott is positioned to be an everykid. He is the all-American boy. Even his family troubles are essentially generic. He is like an alien, the movie posits, because all children are like aliens: new and still outside of adult human norms. But Lilo’s connection with Stitch is not only because of her childhood, though that is absolutely part of it. Her age makes her particularly powerless within her own life, as evidenced by her inability to affect the outcome of her custody. On top of that, she is an Indigenous Hawai’ian, a girl, an orphan, and a little weirdo, all of which intersect with her age to create this complex tangle of Otherness that makes her really feel just like Stitch, the maligned sole member of his kind. Regarding Lilo’s weirdness, many viewers have read her as neurodivergent, and specifically as autistic. I think this reading makes sense, though it is not explicit in the text. I do think it’s important not to treat “autistic” and “socially strange” as a complete circle of a Venn diagram – one does not need to be autistic to relate to Lilo’s eccentricities, and there are plenty of autistic people whose neurotypes manifest in ways that are completely different from Lilo – but I do think a neurodiversity and disability reading is very available to us here. In any case, I like that this film acknowledges that “child” is not a standalone identity. It intersects with all other social positionalities, and depending on what those are, some kids are absolutely rendered as more “alien” than others.
After Nani loses her last chance at a job, she is despondent, but her friend (who has a huge crush on her), David, tries to cheer the little family up with some surfing. David, who is also Indigenous Hawai’ian, joins Nani and Lilo in a cultural activity that brings joy to the three of them without spectators. The beach, right now, is only theirs. Stitch watches this bonding experience and longs to be a part of it. Jumba, spying from afar, is taken aback when Stitch willingly surfs with the family, because due to Stitch’s density, he is particularly vulnerable to drowning. Jumba didn’t create Stitch to do things like trust, and yet now here he is. But when Jumba tries to grab Stitch in the water, both Stitch and Lilo are knocked off the board. Nani saves her sister and David saves Stitch, but it’s too late: Mr. Bubbles has arrived and seen the moment of danger. In a more gentle voice than he’s previously used, he tells Nani, “I know you’re trying, Nani, but you need to think about what’s best for Lilo, even if it removes you from the picture.”
So, here’s the thing about Mr. Bubbles: the audience is not positioned to dislike him, but is positioned to think he is incorrect. We know that being without Nani – who correctly says that she’s the only one who understands her sister – is not what’s best for Lilo. We also know that that would be awful for Nani, who is also a young orphan and deserves to remain with what’s left of her family. As Laemmerhirt points out, this entire central plotline likens the state’s threat to Lilo and Nani’s family to the colonial overthrow of Hawai’i, particularly in the next scene, where Nani sings the song “Aloha Oe” to Lilo. This song, translated as “Farewell to Thee,” was written by Queen Lili’uokalani, the last monarch of Hawai’i before its annexation by the United States. Though continental U.S. children may not know that and therefore the meaning may go over the heads of much of the young intended audience outside of Hawai’i, the implication for those who are in the know – including, presumably, children like Lilo – is not subtle. And yet, as in E.T., we pull our punches here by the unwillingness to portray any specific adult representative of the state as actually harmful. Mr. Bubbles is, at most, simply mistaken in his assessment of the situation. And not for nothing, he is Black; so though he represents the white colonial government, he also embodies racial Otherness within that system of power. So we have this implication of both historical and contemporary state violence via the literal taking of people in Hawai’i, but no actual face to that system that we are supposed to dislike or even find ill intent within. I mean, watching it now as an adult, I’m like, “Bubbles, you’re a social worker, why are you not connecting Nani with social services?”, but that is not something the movie itself brings up.
Okay, so at this point, Stitch, catching the sadness of the mood, decides to leave. Lilo doesn’t try to stop him, but she asks what happened to his own family, saying, “I know that’s why you wreck things.” She tells him, “Our family is little now, and we don’t have many toys, but if you want, you can be part of it.” At this point, my wife starts crying next to me on the couch, despite having seen this movie roughly one million times because it’s her favorite. I love you, babe. Regardless, Stitch leaves, calling out “I’m lost” like the illustration of the Ugly Duckling. Jumba sees his opportunity and approaches, and when Stitch says he’s waiting for his family, Jumba says, “You don’t have one. I made you” and “You’re built to destroy. You will never belong.” Unsurprisingly, Stitch doesn’t just go along with being captured after all this, and the ensuing struggle destroys Lilo and Nani’s house, compounding Nani’s troubles with the state as Mr. Bubbles returns to collect Lilo. Lilo briefly turns against Stitch, who she says “ruined everything,” as he reveals that he, too, is an alien, just like the ones who wrecked her home. So dark nights of the soul all around.
Aaand then we have a chaotic climactic sequence in which Stitch and Lilo are captured by the United Galactic Federation, Jumba and Pleakley join forces with Nani to rescue them, and Stitch saves the day. During this scene, Lilo asks Stitch, “Don’t leave me, okay?”, and all is forgiven and forgotten in the face of danger. After some crash landings, the Federation attempts to arrest Jumba, Pleakley, and 626 – or “Stitch,” as he interrupts. The Councilwoman is astonished when Stitch explains that he not only has a name, but a family: “I found it all on my own. Is little and broken, but still good. Yeah, still good.” The Councilwoman is moved, but the law dictates that she must take Stitch into custody. But wait! Lilo produces the receipt from the animal shelter, explaining that she paid two U.S. dollars for Stitch, so if anyone takes him, “that’s stealing.” The STATE OF HAWAII legend is prominent at the top of the paper. And, indeed, that clinches it: the aliens are bound by the paper trail. As Bubbles, who it turns out is a former CIA operative who has dealt with aliens before, explains, aliens are all about rules. Not only Stitch but also Jumba and Pleakley are allowed to serve out their exile on Earth.
So, like, hooray, but also, there’s a lot going on here. First of all, that’s quite the quick turnaround for Jumba, but, like, sure. More significantly, the deus ex machina is United States property rights. Cheng notes that, with the CIA revelation, Bubbles “ties family to the state explicitly” (124), and in turn is there to show that while alien law is “overly rigid,” U.S. law is ultimately “morally right” (129). Bubbles’s turnaround is also pretty quick, as he is like, well, now that you have some exiled aliens to help rebuild your house, you can stay together, which doesn’t really fit with his decision-making pattern throughout the film, but maybe seeing the lengths to which Nani was willing to go to save her sister helped. The point is that he winds up on the family’s side after representing the outside threat to it until now. Unlike the rule-bound aliens, the human American state can bend when presented with new evidence and circumstances. This undercuts a lot of the film’s prior critique of state forces within Hawai’i, in what I see as the movie’s biggest pulled punch. Not that I want there to not be a happy ending, but how state actors are framed within that happy ending could have been altered to not culminate in a rug pull for the prior anti-imperial themes.
Also, at this point – and I didn’t script this in – but it occurs to me that I should note that I haven’t seen the live-action remake, because I haven’t seen any Disney live-action remakes, and I’m not about to break that streak now, but I do know that they changed the ending and extremely for the worst. So I anticipate that there might have been some chat in the comments about that – I know and agree, and absolute travesty, but I haven’t seen the film, so we won’t discuss it here.
Cheng, who, as you recall, critiques the assimilationist thread of the narrative, sees that plot really coming to fruition in the ending, as well. Stitch has become the model citizen; he has renounced his destructive ways, the things that made him monstrous to those around him, and become someone who can operate within an American family unit. Granted, it’s an enlarged non-nuclear family, with two sisters, three aliens, Bubbles, and David, but Cheng argues, “The non-nuclear family here then suggests the film’s message of validating other family forms through the figure of the alien, though what exceeds the director’s appeal to family is also the appeal [of] the unity of the homogenous nation through the narrative of domesticity” (129). Cheng takes a more overall negative view of the film than I do – I think she under-accounts for the importance of Lilo and Stitch’s remaining strangeness, so I think “homogenous” is an overstatement here – but she’s not wrong that the movie prizes the explicitly American domestic sphere, as seen in the closing sequence. Lilo, Nani, and Stitch celebrate a variety of all-American holidays, including Halloween and Christmas, with just little alien twists. In “Stitch: The Creation, the Model Citizen, and the Reality Discovered through Exile,” Emily King – different Emily – calls attention to the sort of utopian multiculturalism of this ending, as cultures are blended in the melting pot of Hawai’i. The credits roll over a series of family photos, including a literal recreation of Norman Rockwell’s famous Thanksgiving painting with the blended ‘ohana from the film – with Bubbles at the head of the table.
So it does feel like the film is like, hey, remember all those negative implications about America vis-a-vis Hawai’i? Mm, don’t take them that seriously, Disney audiences! And, indeed, Disney as a corporation used the release of this film to do a massive tourism deal in Hawai’i. The “fakey luau” that Nani decries is definitely currently repackaged and reproduced in Disney resorts. What else would you expect? It’s Disney, the most American capitalist business around. I think the only way for Lilo & Stitch to have not carried such intense thematic tensions would be for it to not be a Disney movie. Maybe in some other small studio, we could have really gone all in on the anti-imperialism. But as it is, we get the “two things are true,” ideologically contradictory film.
It’s a film that I love, to be clear. Now, I’m not Hawai’ian, and I don’t want my fondness for the movie to be read as an official scholarly endorsement. We just all have problematic faves. The thing that really draws me to this film, though, is the triumph of the weird girl. Lilo gets to find belonging without changing a damn thing about herself. Stitch does change, it’s true, but not to become less weird, just to have people who he cares about. That may be assimilationist, but it’s also just prosocial, and you know I love when a monster finds his community. Lilo doesn’t have to remain in a nuclear family with just the sweet memories of alienness like Elliott does. She gets to have an extended family network that embraces alienness, including her own. It’s an outcome that I wish for all the children who feel like aliens on our very weird planet.
CONCLUSION
There’s something almost ironic inherent in the discussion of a Spielberg movie and a Disney movie about the child’s connection with the alien. It’s hard to get more mainstream American than these two cultural forces. Spielberg’s sentimentalism and spectacle are well known but dwarfed by the same qualities in the massive institution of Disney, which is basically the tone setter for idealized American childhood. Yet even they acknowledge in these films that, actually, childhood can be lonely and isolating and bewildering to navigate. Adults control children’s lives without necessarily understanding them – or even wanting to – and children themselves are left to figure out their place in a vast, confusing world when, relatively speaking, they just got here. We’ve seen the ways that E.T. and Lilo & Stitch struggle with ideological consistency in their depictions of adult-child power dynamics and relationships, but both films maintain a throughline of presenting children’s knowledge and ways of being as legitimate, real, and important – and so, so frequently overlooked and misconstrued by the adults around them. For all the distance the adultist world creates between the functioning of society and the voices and agency of children, the latter truly might as well be aliens.
I’m now very curious to see whether those more independent, not-corporately-bound stories of the child and the alien may exist, so definitely let me know any recommendations you have in the comments. How can we push this form of storytelling to encapsulate even more of the forces that alienate childhood, without pulling our punches this time? And could these stories ever inspire actual change? Because despite the presence of E.T. as a shared monocultural artefact for the past 45 years, the adultist forces that it critiques haven’t gone anywhere. Same with the past 25 years of Lilo & Stitch (and apologies to my fellow millennials for that reminder of the passage of time). But I still believe that they could be harnessed, because, despite all the many drawbacks of these big studio productions calibrated for mainstream appeal, they do provide us with a shared language, a shared metaphorical framework. And that is what I’m all about: using these monster and monster-adjacent metaphors to help explain actual realities of childhood and youth. So maybe what I’m saying is just go forth and do that. Find someone who’s never thought about social constructions of childhood in their life – which won’t be hard to do, since that’s most people – and use aliens to explain some structure of childhood that you think needs changing. And definitely let me know if that helps them understand!
I hope that you enjoyed this video, and if you did, please remember to like and share. Make sure that you subscribe to the channel so that you never miss a monstrous conversation. If you want to join a monster community, check out those links to themonsterandthechild.com and my Patreon in the description. I will be back soon with a short review video discussing the novel Monstrilio by Gerardo Sámano Córdova, which several people have told me to read and I now finally have, and then my next full video essay is going to be about the recent 28 Years Later films. So getting some proper scares in for spooky season – at least as far as I’m concerned, since zombies are the monsters that most frequently make it into my literal nightmares. I hope that you also have some good spooks planned for October, and I will see you soon with more monstrous food for thought.
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Media discussed:
- E.T.: The Extraterrestrial, dir. Steven Spielberg (1982)
- Lilo & Stitch, dir. Chris Sanders & Dean DeBlois (2002)
References:
- Cheng, E. (2007). Family, Race and Citizenship in Disney’s Lilo and Stitch. In N. Scott (Ed.), Monsters and the Monstrous: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil, pp. 121-132. Brill.
- Hoberman, J. (2006). Laugh, Cry, Believe: Spielbergization and Its Discontents. Virginia Quarterly Review, 83(1).
- King, E. (2025). Stitch: The Creation, The Model Citizen, and The Reality Discovered Through Exile. The Digital Literature Review, 12(6), 84-98.
- Laemmerhirt, I. (2013). From Outer Space to Paradise?
Remapping Hawai’i in Lilo and Stitch. Komparatistik Online, 8, 83-93 - Magistrate, A. (1984). Innocence Unrewarded: A Note on E.T. and the Myth of Adolescence. Science Fiction Studies, 11(2), 223-225.
- Perea, K. (2018). Touching Queerness in Disney Films Dumbo and
Lilo & Stitch. Social Sciences, 7. - Russell, P.R. (1983). Parallel Romantic Fantasies: Barrie’s “Peter Pan” and Spielberg’s “E.T.: The Extraterrestrial”. Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 8(4), 28-30.
