The new animated short “Lilo & Scratch” immediately sets up audience expectations with its opening shot featuring a clip of the Three Stooges — expect comic hijinks, anarchy and cartoon destruction.
For the first “Lilo & Stitch” project from Disney Animation since the original 2002 feature, and the first short from the unit in five years, directors Malcolm Pierce and Fawn Veerasunthorn ride the anarchy of the Stooges that lives in Stitch and introduce a new character, Scratch, a cute, cuddly kitten whose destructive forces rival the Lilo’s beloved blue “dog.”
The short will unspool before Disney’s “Hexed,” which will be released Nov. 25.
“Stitch is awesome,” says Pierce. “I feel like what I love is that he sort of lets his intrusive thoughts win, but he’s kind of a troublemaker too, which is really fun. So that was just super exciting, just to see what we can do that could put Stitch in a situation where he can make the most mischievous and troublemaking choices.”
The plot of the short sees Lilo come home with a cute cat, which she calls Scratch, then leave the new pet in the care of Stitch (who’s watching the Three Stooges with glee). The cat quickly shows its true colors, creating trouble in ever-escalating comic situations that are laugh out loud funny and absurd.
Veerasunthorn is also a big Stitch fan, noting the 2002 film’s bold comedy and “the character’s deep desire to belong. It also came out when I was still in art school, so this film had made a big impression on me as an artist.”
She adds that “when Jared Bush, [Walt Disney Animation Studios] chief creative officer, had this casual conversation with us — and I say casual because it happened in the hallway” to create a comedy-forward short “that showcases the fun of animation,” it was a no-brainer to go back to Lilo and Stitch. She says that she, Pierce and producer Nathan Curtis bounced around ideas and they narrowed the theme down to one question: Wouldn’t it be fun if chaotic stitch had to take care of a mysterious cute cat?
Bush also wanted to play with new techniques for their animation pipeline.
“The most exciting thing was to kind of merge these two worlds from Disney Animation, this old school Disney renaissance 2D aesthetic with our more modern CG pipeline,” says VFX supervisor Jeremy Sikorski. “We got a taste of what this would be on some of our other short form projects like ‘Paper Man’ and more recently, ‘Once Upon a Studio.’ So this felt like a real opportunity to somewhat officialize and push things even further to see where we could kind of take these aesthetics that the world has loved for so many years.”
He adds: “We asked ourselves how could we create a production pipeline that no matter the artist’s chosen mediums, they could work in the project and work all together — quite often in the same exact frame — in a totally revolutionary and new way of working.”
For the short, they studied the original feature and created a “toolset that would allow artists to blend their talents.”
For example, a background could be hand-painted watercolor, but the Lilo and Stitch characters set against the background are 3D sculptures.
They did an early test to see if their concept was going to work, using a hand-drawn Scratch and a CG Stitch holding a blaster in a sequence.
“And the blaster he’s holding actually transitions from CG to hand drawn as Scratch eats it. When we looked at the finished results of this test, we were convinced we could do it, and we knew this was going to work, which is super exciting,” says Sikorski.
Adds Veerasunthorn, “We wanted to give our artists an ability to choose their preferred medium to create a brand-new background for the short. So we actually do both. Some of these are digitally painted in Photoshop to look like watercolor, and some are actually hand painted on paper traditionally.”
The six-minute short packs a lot of action and gags. “I think because Stitch is so popular, folks have an assumption of what Stitch is. He’s in merchandise everywhere. He’s he can be so familiar nowadays, so we really wanted to remind people of how you know hardcore he can be, how he can break stuff, and gets grumpy, and he’s got an edge to him, and so we really had fun just thinking about ‘What are all like the crazy things Stitch can do?’” says Pierce.
Veerasunthorns adds: “We thought, who would be the worthy opponent of Stitch? They must meet each other at the same one-upping level. You know we always think Stitch would say, ‘I got this,’ and then Scratch would be like ‘Hold my beer, I got more.’ How do they kind of keep escalating the situation? And actually, the first cut of this reel was about 10 minutes because we had so many more jokes, and we had to narrow it down and say goodbye to some of our darlings.”
A cat opponent would be a natural antagonist for Stitch, who’s still called Lilo’s “ugly blue dog.”
Veerasunthorn said her initial design was more mysterious-looking and sort of weird, but they realized she had to be a lot cuter for audiences to embrace her.
She also needed her own sound, which is where composers Haim Mazar and Grace Fisher came in. “She definitely has, like, a heavy metal voice, which is very unique to this short,” says Fisher.
The duo had a lot of fun creating the music for the comedic action sequences — inspired by Carl Stalling and Tom and Jerry cartoons. The familiar had to blend with the new in the short.
Says Mazar, “One of our biggest challenges was coming up with something that would feel fresh and contemporary, and at the same time, feel familiar, so that right from the first note you feel like, ‘I know this world’ and welcome to our ohana, so to speak. I think if I had to explain it, it was it was probably a combination of the style of the melodic material that we were we were going for something that would feel like it’s melodic and maybe even lyrical at times, but it also has a little sense of — I guess dare I say — pop music, and it it feels like a little bit of a fun ear worm.”
Mazar adds that they recorded an orchestra, but also “small ensembles that had a lot of close miking and very tactile sounding shakers and and and all sorts of Hawaiian guitars, and I think producing it in a way that feels very contemporary, like a like a like a record that you would hear nowadays, and fusing that with the orchestra was what kind of gave it a little bit of a fresh taste.”
Veerasunthorns adds that because the characters are mostly non-verbal, it’s really like paradise for animation. … the fact that we are able to get hand-drawn artists and CG animators working together is something that we’re super proud of, because we used to be like either or, and everyone just wanted to work on it.”
