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When my friends and I were kids, sometime in the last century (or maybe it was the one before that-we're talking a long time ago), we all had the same cinematic dream. Walt Disney would do science-fiction. Back before CGI, good stop-motion work notwithstanding, the only way to imagine properly transporting the work of Asimov or Heinlein or Clarke, Russell or Leinster or van Vogt to the big screen, was via traditional hand-drawn animation. Aside from Robert Clampett's unfortunate failed attempt in 1936 to interest Warner Bros. in transferring Edgar Rice Burrough's John Carter of Mars books to film (there are two famous but very brief surviving clips of the test reel Clampett made, showing John Carter swinging on a vine and riding a thoat-the rest of the reel was lost in a fire), that meant hoping Walt Disney would become interested in working with the genre.
He never did, preferring to stick with traditional European fantasy. But the hope was always there among us kids, especially given the superb job the studio did with its liveaction version of Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Subsequent to Unca Walt's passing, the closest Disney seems to be able to come to doing science-fiction is the related bastard genre of science-fantasy, wherein science-fiction tropes are utilized to support what is ultimately and at heart a fantasy film. This was the case with Atlantis, a better film than many are willing to credit. It is also true of Lilo and Stitch, the studio's latest traditionally animated release.
Encouragingly, the film starts out as real science-fiction. In a galactic court, renegade scientist Jumba (David Ogden Stiers, become a Disney regular) is charged with illegal genetic experimentation resulting in the creation of a creature (Experiment 636, voiced by writer Sanders) designed only to destroy. Judging from his accent, the four-eyed alien scientist hails from the planet Moscow. Judged and found guilty, he is imprisoned while his creation is condemned to exile. However, in the vicinity of Earth, the little monster escapes by virtue of making clever use of plain saliva (the weapons trained on him are coded to fire only at something with his genetic signature, so he spits all over the place) and makes a successful landing on...