Two new live-action remakes are recreating Millennial staples, Lilo & Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon, as transparent facsimiles, and they’re both reasonably fine. If you’ve never watched either animated movie, you’d maybe even call the live-action versions pretty good for your first experiences with these stories. Both movies understand what works essentially from their predecessors and don’t reinvent the wheel. They keep things pretty safe and strict, which translates into pleasant but predictable entertainment for anyone familiar with the originals.

I don’t even know how to fully review these entries, which is why I’m combining them together. They’re both so thoroughly fine yet one is the highest-grossing movie of 2025 so far, the popularity of which I cannot explain. My conceptual issue with the nature of live-action remakes is the implicit belief that animated films improve when they are brought into a real-world setting. I strongly disagree. Animated movies can be vibrant, stylistic, and exaggerated in such daring and artistically enigmatic ways. Translating that into real-life often strips away that style or liveliness; take for instance how un-expressive and dour the “live-action” Lion King was, a collection of possessed (cursed?) taxidermy. Animation does not require verisimilitude to be entertaining or engaging. I’m also worried over the speed of which these live-action remakes are coming, now refreshing fairly recent movies. Has there been enough distance between now and 2010 to have compelling artistic differences with the original How to Train Your Dragon? Apparently not. When the live-action Moana comes out in 2026, will it be dramatically different or better than the animated version? I strongly doubt it. We need more distance from the original animated movies so the remakes aren’t just slavish yet inferior versions of the originals. There needs to be more than simply a tracing over. I don’t see this ending any time soon considering the commercial rewards, and so the live-action Lilo & Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon continue to be good stories, just unnecessary.

Nate’s Grades: B