Chris Sanders is the creator of Disney’s Lilo and Stitch. He talks to Mike about the 20th anniversary of the movie, how he first drew Stitch in the 80’s for a kid’s book and how he ended up becoming the voice in the movie. Chris also shares why music was so important to the development of the story and when we can expect a new installment in the franchise. Plus a spoiler free movie review of Thor Love and Thunder!
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello, and welcome back to Movie Mike's movie podcast. I
am your host Movie Mike a very special episode for you.
This week, I have on Chris Sanders, who is the
creator of Leland Stitch. He is also the voice of Stitch,
which if you've been listening to this podcast for any
amount of time, you know that lel and Stitch is
my favorite Disney movie. So it was like getting to
(00:22):
talk to a hero on this week's episode. I'll also
give you my spoiler free movie review of thor Love
and Thunder, my most anticipated movie of the summer. We
have so much to get to on this episode. Always
no more of your time. If you guys in the
movie crew are ready, let's just get started. Let's talk movies.
In a world where everyone and their mother has a podcast,
(00:44):
one man stands to infiltrate the ears of listeners like
never before in a movie podcast. A man with so
much movie knowledge. He's basically like a walking AUDIMTV Who's
glasses from the Nashville Podcast Network Movie You may not
(01:04):
know his name, but you definitely know his work. My
guest this week is Chris Sanders, who is the creator
of Disney's Leelo and Stitch, he's also the voice of Stitch,
and long before he wrote and directed this movie in
two thousand and two, he also worked as a story
artist on Disney movies like The Rescuers, down Under, Beauty
(01:25):
and the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King and really got
his start when he was the head of the story
on Mulan. Working on that movie led to him pitching
his idea that he's had since the eighties of Lelo
and Stitch. Lelo and Stitch was his first hit as
a writer and director, and even after Leelo and Stitch,
he went on to write and direct animated movies like
(01:46):
How to Train Your Dragon and The Crudes. So he's
a super talented guy. If you're a fan of Lelo
and Stitch or just a fan of Disney, I think
you're gonna love his story. So let's talk movies with
Chris Sanders. I am on now with somebody I'm so
excited to talk to. I'm on with Chris Sanders. How
are you today? Good? How are you? I'm doing really
good now. A couple of things led me here to
(02:08):
having you on the podcast. Lilo and Stitch has been
my favorite Disney movie since I was a kid. And
earlier this year, I was scrolling through TikTok and I
see you there and I recognized you, and I didn't
realize the backstory of Lilo and Stitch and how it
came to be, so I knew once it hit that
twentieth anniversary, I had to reach out to you to
get you on the podcast. Cool. Yeah, it's been really
(02:28):
nice to do those TikTok's and um, that was just
a response to I don't remember what it was exactly,
but I ran across somebody who really didn't know anything
about where the movie came from, and that was that
wake up call to me realizing how much time had
gone by and quite a few people didn't know the
backstory to it. So it's been really fun to begin
(02:48):
that series dressing up someone the material, which a lot
of this stuff, just with animators and animation, a lot
of stuff ends up in people's garages. You know, there's
a lot of stuff in the archives. But I still
have the original drawings and the original manuscripts that I
used to pitch the project. So um, that's amongst the
stuff that I was digging up and beginning to put
up on on TikTok. So that people could take a
(03:11):
look at it, and that's so cool to see. And
I want to get to the movie, but I kind
of want to start back at the beginning. When you
were growing up in Colorado, what made you fall in
love with animation? I loved straw. My dad, I thought,
was a great artist. He did paintings and he would
draw like these buck Grudgers style spaceships. And I remember
one day he said, there's a limit to what you
(03:32):
can build, but you can draw anything. And that really
stuck with me, and um, and so I really I
always had a love to a love of drawing. It
didn't occur to me that I could turn that into
a career. And tell you know, many years later, I
was nearing the end of high school, trying to figure
out what to do with the rest of my life,
and my grandmother was reading an article in the Denver Post,
which was our local newspaper, and she was reading this
(03:55):
article all about how Disney Studios was running low on animators.
They were retiring, and they were looking for a way
to replenish their ranks. They created an animation program at
this school in California called the cal Arts And I thought, oh,
my gosh, that's where I want to go. So I'd
always liked animation, I'd enjoyed it, but I've never thought
(04:15):
of it as a possible career path until she told
me about that school. And that's the only place I applied.
How did you know you were? It went from just
you just drawing to like, oh, I'm actually pretty good
at this, Like this is something I could actually pursue
and go to that school. You don't know, Um, I
was really crossing my fingers that my drawings were good enough.
I think a lot of kids at cal Arts were
(04:38):
like some of the local best artists from where they
came from, so I was not unusual in that. Like
I did cartoons for my school newspaper, so when they
needed cartoons, people would come to me at at our
Vata High School and um, you know, when they needed
a mascot drawn or a T shirt drawn or something
like that. Likewise, a lot of the kids I ended
up within my classic cal Arts same kind of thing.
(05:00):
And that was really sobering because like, I went from
being I thought a person who could draw pretty well
to being so bird. When I'm sitting next to somebody
named Kelly Asbury, Kelly Asbury keep a good friend of mine,
and he just drew so much better than I did.
I thought he just drew amazingly well. And he drew
with a pen because he had this confidence, and I
always drew a pencil because I was never really sure.
(05:20):
I was like, I want to erase this and move
things around. And he took out this ink pen and
he would just draw what he wanted and I'm like,
oh my gosh, he's so much better than I am,
right um, And you know it's still that way. I
think one of the things that's really cool about the
animation industry is that if you ever are looking for inspiration,
just walk down the hall. There's somebody down that hall
that's gonna be way better at stuff than you are,
(05:41):
and so inspiration to bounced. I mean, in turn, that
makes you become better. You see other people just crushing
it and you're like, I want to get to that level.
I want to be that good too. I want to
creak out my best idea so I can get the
better jobs and get the things I want to achieve. Right,
absolutely absolutely, because nobody, I mean there's no nobody draws
the back. Everybody draws you know their own things in
(06:02):
their own ways and stuff like that, and it's that great.
It's that great coming together of all those different artistic
styles where you can get these wonderful films and you
get these wonderful projects and stuff like that. If I
went back in time and and changed out one single
artist on one of these films, the film would be
a little bit different. So they are. They're literally a
conglomeration of the talents that were gathered for that particular project.
(06:24):
So you go out to this school and how long
is it until you get your first page job to
where Okay, this is turning into my career. A lot
of people would leave school at that time early. A
lot of people graduated on their third year. Um I didn't.
I stuck with it for four years. I was very
aware that this is my last chance to go to
school before I would go and start working for the
(06:45):
rest of my life. So I hung in there for
the four years. At the time that I graduated, Oddly enough,
Disney Studios was no longer hiring, so the place I
was really hoping to go was not an option at
that point. So I did find a job at Marvel Productions.
Now that wasn't the comic book part of Marvel. It
was the animation side of it, and they did Saturday
(07:05):
Morning cartoons. I got a job on The Muppet Babies. Now,
the funny thing about that is that one of the
things that he would always tell us in cal Arts
is draw, draw, draw, draw every day, draw things that
you see around you. It'll make you a better artist. Well,
I didn't want to draw the things I saw around me.
I didn't want to draw shares, I didn't want to
draw tables. I didn't want to draw people's shoes, you know.
I wanted to draw the stuff that I wanted to draw.
(07:25):
The funny thing is, at Marvel Productions on The Muppet
Baby's Show, I was in the model department, which meant
anything that was going to be in the cartoon had
to be drawn first as a turn so that they
could color it and model it and send it overseas
so that everything would be on model. So the funny
thing is my first job was really drawing things that
I had avoided drawing in the past. I drew chairs
(07:48):
and tables and shoes and dresses and everyday objects, a
lot of them, right, And it was amazing training. So
you're working at Marvel, and I saw that you said
that you had the first drawing a stitch in n
What about that story? What about that sketch made you
come back to it years later when you finally get
(08:08):
this opportunity to create this story for Disney. I had
worked a little bit on it in private. I wanted
us to do a children's book. And what I realized
after working on it for a while in private, you know,
on my own time, was that the story was too
big to fit into a normally formatted children's book. I
didn't think I could boil this thing down to stay
seventeen pages or thirty two pages. It just seemed too big.
(08:30):
Um So, the idea was bigger than my book. Um So,
years later, I was in the waning days of the
production of Mulan. We made that film at the Florida Studio.
So I was out in Florida, and the president of
Feature Animation at that time, Tom Schumacher, was out visiting,
and um, he and I and everybody had gone through
a lot making this film. It had been quite the adventure.
(08:53):
I think that my performance on that film had earned me,
had earned me a certain amount of I guess latitude
to maybe do my own movie. And Tom was out
visiting Florida and he said, is there anything that you
would want to do next? And pretty much right there
at dinner, I said, no, no, not well wait a minute, okay,
(09:14):
you know there is this one thing. There was this story, right,
and so I was able to think about it for
a little bit. And the next time he visited, he said, well,
and I was trying to work up a pitch for it,
you know, and and uh, and he said, well, go ahead,
just tell me about it. And I said, well, I'm
not really ready, and he goes, no, just come on,
just do it, you know, And I thought, here he
goes my idea. I mean, I'm like, it's it's gonna
(09:34):
be all over the next like in the next three minutes.
And I pitched it, just verbally threw it out there,
and I really got my very first and biggest note
of all, which was the story that I had concocted
was all about this strange little creature who was living
in a forest and he didn't he had come from.
He was a mystery to everything around him, but he
was also a bit of a mystery to himself. And
(09:54):
the story was all about how he was figuring out
who he was, and he was frightening looking a bit
of a monster, right, And Tom said, I like this story,
but I would have a suggestion. The animal world is
in a sense already alien to us, so placing this
alien being in the animal world doesn't get you the
kind of contrast that you might want. I would suggest
(10:15):
you placed this monster in the human world. Boom, there
it was. I thought that was a great idea. So
that was the first biggest note that Lelo and Stitch
ever got. Now this is before it was Lelo and Stitch,
before they were in Hawaii. That was when I left
and started working on the idea. Once I returned to California,
and that's where I got. I got this uh motel
room out in Palm Springs at this resort, and I
(10:37):
locked on myself in this room for three days and
all I did was draw and write because I wanted
to create a bit of a document because it was
going to be about an alien. And I thought, you
know what, those are the days where people were making
a lot of monstery kind of alien movies. And I thought,
if you say the word alien in a development meeting
or a pitch, A lot of people are going to
get this instant idea of what an alien is. And
(10:58):
I thought, Okay, if I don't draw this, they're gonna
get maybe the wrong idea. So if I draw this
whole thing out and they say no to it, at
least they're saying no to the idea that was my idea,
so it's a legitimate no. So um. So, after those
three days, what occurred to me was that in a sense,
I had finally created that children's book that I had
(11:19):
tried to create so many years before and had abandoned.
That's really interesting to me because I was rewatching it
and I realized how hard it must have been to
pitch an idea about this alien creature doesn't really say
a whole lot of words. So to hear you say
that you took that idea, placed it into Hawaii, and
suddenly it made sense. You know, this is where you've
(11:40):
really got to understand, like how important the producer and
ahead of a studio are to your future. They can
make or break an idea. And in this case, Tom Schumacher,
he wanted to make this film and he that was
the next big thing was that it's a's the thing
I'm going to put on a TikTok really soon, and
I'm working on that one right now. He told me
(12:00):
after the development department looked at it, that they all
like universally liked the idea, and he said I watched
into his office, into his office, and he said, I
will make this film on one condition that it looked
like you drew it. And that was, you know, very
exciting and flattering. But at that point I didn't even
know what to do because I thought, well, what do
I even draw like? I just draw like everybody else.
(12:21):
A girl who was working at the studios to Nichols,
who was an amazing artist. She also came from cal Arts.
She did a two week analysis of my art style
and she created two documents called Surfing the Sanders Style,
and it explained how I drew well. Nobody was more
interested to read these than I was, and I was
absolutely fascinated. It turns out there were things that were
(12:45):
governing my style that existed that I didn't really even
realize that I was doing, but she saw them and
she had like dissected the whole thing. So that began,
and that's one of the reasons that Leelo and Stitch
is a highly unusual film. It is more unusual than
people really, I think may may realize, because it is
not only a very Miyazaki style story that is extremely
(13:08):
hard to mail down. You know, it's a smaller story,
and it's really kind of strange, based very very much
on quirky, unusual characters. Really, you know, these personalities are
the are the whole movie. But also that it's in
an individual artists style, and that's I don't think there's
anything that has happened really before or since, at least
with an artist inside the studio they've based films on,
(13:31):
say like Isaac Isaac u Ivan Girl. Sleeping Beauty is
based very much on Ivan Girl, for example. Um but
he was an outside creator. So it's one of the
reasons that that's such an unusual film. So when do
you sit down to create what is going to be
Lelo and Stitch, you have to create Lilo. When did
it get that title? When did they get that final art?
(13:51):
It was Lelo and Stitch by the time it was
in that first pitch book. So when I went away
to Palm Springs, by that point I had made the
decision to place the film in Hawaii. I had named
the characters Leelo and Stitch, and I had no connections
to Hawaii at that point. So I pulled Leelo's name
off of a roadmap that I had from Hawaii. There's
a Lil Lane and I saw that. So this is
(14:13):
one of the strange things. I didn't know what that
word meant. It sounded like a name. It turns out
it's not a name, but it's the It's the word
for lost. So in a really strange way, I found
the right word to make that her name. The same
with Nanni, I just again I looked around for names
on a roadmap. Later on in the making of the film,
(14:36):
we did engage as many people as we could from
Hawaii because we're toughing about it. We're trotting into a
culture that we are not part of, and if you're
going to do that, you really have to connect with
people that know what the deal is, that know what
they're doing for the music, for the culture, for the dialogue,
for your voices, as much as you can. So um
(14:56):
and so we did. We met a huge number of
people who came our guides to making the film be respectful.
Going into the start of making this movie. At what
point did you become the voice of Stitch? Were you
always going to be Stitch or was that a voice
that just existed in your head? Where did that come from?
It's sort of both. It was it was a voice.
I had used this up to that point to call
(15:17):
people on the telephone with and annoy them. UM. And
it was actually Dean, my co director. So along the
lines of your last question, one of the first things
you do is you find a co director that you trust,
and I had learned to trust Dean into partment, into
partner with Dean during the making of Mulan and Dean
was extremely smart and amazing, a natural and it came
to storytelling, he was a natural storyteller, a great writer,
(15:41):
a wonderful story artist. UM. And he has very good
structural knowledge and structural instincts. So so I partnered with
him immediately. Um. As soon as we decided to do
the project, I saw out and we we agreed to
co direct on the film. Dean's suggested that I be
the voice of Stitch. One of the main reasons was
(16:02):
that we wanted Originally we didn't want Stitch to even speak.
We were like, oh, it's gonna be like dumb, but
we'll do the whole film and he will just be
a character that works in pandomime. Later on, it became
obvious that he was going to have to speak, and
in fact, he would have some key lines during the film. Well,
at that point we thought, okay, we're gonna we're gonna
have to get a voice, but you don't want to
(16:22):
necessarily hire somebody like Robert Redford or Danny DeVito and
then worry about like, well, how is the studio going
to react when they realize this character only says like
fifteen things, and will they then start to push for like, well,
if you know, if we're gonna hire Robert Redford, we
want to you know, we want Robert Redford. We want
like a lot of lines. And we were afraid that
that might begin to really be the tail that wagged
the dog as far as the making of the film.
(16:44):
So Dean suggested, He's like, you know what, why didn't
you just do the voice? You used that voice when
you pitch your boards, So why don't you just do it?
And then we'll avoid any problem because you know, you're
not a real actor. Nobody's no one's gonna ask for
more of you, right. So we didn't do that at
and there came up a moment. There was only one
moment that I felt a little stressed about it, and
that was when we realized that near the very end
(17:07):
of the film, Stitch would have this one very important
line where he talks about this family that he found.
And it was little and it was broken, but it
was still good and that verged on real acting, and
so I thought, I don't know if I can do this.
On that day, I came to Dean and I said, today,
I'm an actor, and you're going to be the director,
the only director, and I'm going to go in that booth,
(17:29):
and you tell me what to do and I'll do it.
And if I can't pull this off, then we'll find
somebody else to do the voice. And so we did.
Like Dean directed me, I did everything he asked, and
before long he said, okay, I think we got it.
And I said, are you sure? And he said, yeah,
I think we got it. And it worked. Okay, you
brought up my favorite scene in the entire movie. I
think it's because of that. It's that moment in the
(17:51):
movie where everything kind of hits me emotionally and I
remember watching it as a kid and having that same
kind of feeling of Stitch, of being that person who
was filled with ray age in a place that he
didn't understand, didn't understand himself, but all of a sudden
he had this family. Now, I think that's the most
perfect scene in any Disney movie I've seen. So it's
cool how that came together. And now you had to
go dig out your acting abilities in that. I did
(18:14):
my best. I really tried hard to that day. I
still remember that day. This is my family. I found
it on my own, this little and broken but still good. Yeah,
still good. So when people find out you're the voice
of Stitch, do they immediately ask you to do it?
(18:34):
I get asked to do it a lot. It was there.
I had some surgery on my neck at one point
period of time about a year I couldn't do it,
But then I got back to doing it, and I
still do it. I get called up about at least
once a month to come in and do I do
voices for toys and for like parades, things for cruise ships,
all Disney stuff. It's fun. I told myself if I
(18:55):
ever had you on the podcast, I would show you
my voice, and it's actually that scene that I do.
So I would like to let you hear this and
then judge my abilities afterwards and let me know how
I can make it better. All right, okay, all right,
So it's that scene, this Lis my family. I found
it all on my own. It's little I'm broken, but
(19:16):
still good. Yeah, still good. How's that? That's really good?
That's very nice. How do you get the laugh though,
because I've been trying this impression for a while, but
that laugh is and like it's hard to do. The
big laugh is painful. That that is one if you're
doing a recording special, you save that for the very end,
like okay, we'll save all the screaming and the laughs
(19:37):
for the end, and then well we'll do Then you
can just take it to the wall and if you
blow your voice to out, you're fine. The fact that
it being the twentieth anniversary of the movie, when you
go back, what moment sticks out to you as being
the most fun part of the entire process When the
part of the process that I've always loved is music.
(19:59):
Dean and I and Leoo and Stitch was a big
part of this have really I've always loved music, and
and I listened to music. I have never written a
scene in a movie without listening to music while I
worked on that scene. I have also boarded pieces of
movies to music, and there are still there are still
pieces of music that if you play them while you
watch a piece of a Disney movie, it lines up
(20:21):
pretty much exactly. Um, Like, if you go to the
soundtrack for a movie called The Mission, there's a there's
a track from that. I believe it. I believe the
track is The Mission. And um, if you listen to
that while you watch the scene where Moue Foster's ghost
speaks to Simba, it works really really well because that's
the that's the music I I listened to when I
(20:42):
boarded the scene, and I pitched that scene to the
directors with that music. There are scenes in Beauty and
the Beast. I can show you the music that those
were done too. So anyway, so same with Leoland Stitch.
I would listen to music because I write these scenes.
And nothing was more exciting to us than we would
when we would partner with somebody like Allen Silvestri, who
is going to be writing a score. And one of
the things that Leland. Stitch was made for a lower
(21:04):
budget than movies were being made for at the time.
We felt we could buy our story freedom by lowering
the budget, which is exactly what happened. But one of
the things that both you and I told the producer
is going to ask the studio carve off enough money
to buy the best score money can buy, and we
will make the film for whatever is left over. And
that's exactly what they did. So we got Allen Selvestry
(21:26):
and it was this really important day um where we
were looking at the boards and Allen selvester was looking
at the whole film on boards and looking at the outline,
and he said, I really like this movie, and he
had a few suggestions, but he said, there's one thing
I didn't see. I didn't see the moment where Stitch
turns from bad to good, because the Stitch is a
villain that becomes a hero, and that was what the baseis.
(21:47):
That was really the basis of the whole story. He's
the first and I think at this point still the
only Disney villain who then becomes the hero of the story.
And Allan was like, well, where does that happen? And
both Dean and I at that point we're like, oh, well, yeah,
we tried to write it, we couldn't really figure it out.
And it sort of happens here, kind of between these
two shots, and suddenly both died, and I think we're
(22:08):
confronted with the reality that we hadn't really been able
to put it up there on the boards. And I'll
never forget what Allen said. We basically told Alan we
didn't know how to do it, and he said, put
her on screen and I'll do it. And I guess
we were saying we couldn't, we didn't know how to
say it, and he said, put it on screen and
I'll say it, and he said it with music. And
so there's a moment where Nannie realizes that they can't
(22:30):
retrieve Lil and she's crying and Stitches watching her, and
if you listen, there's a subtle change in the music
and Stitch walks up to her and he speaks to her,
and that's the moment of change. And what we realized
at that point was that music does the heaviest lifting
of all when it comes to story, and music is unassailable.
(22:54):
No one's going to laugh at music. You can you
can throw an awkward line in or an awkward shot
and it gets an in vertent laugh and you've kind
of blown it. But nobody laughed in music and um,
so Alan just like taught us such an incredibly important
lesson that day and we really took that to heart.
So later on one DNA and I were working on
How to Train Your Dragon. One of the first things
we do now is we carve out a house for
(23:16):
music in different places in the film. So in How
to Train Your Dragon, in that scene where Hiccup is
going to um bond and and and and um, he's
going to cross this divide and form a connection to
this dragon, no dialogue, it's all music, and we just
the characters shut up. All the characters shut up, and
(23:37):
music takes over. And that's just something that Dina and
I really believe in now. And we learned that on
Lelan Stitch. So was the love for Elvis music always
a part of the story or did that come along
when you're trying to find the music. I was a
big Elvis fan, so I simply gave that. I imprinted
that on Lelo and it was really cool because we
actually had to engage with the Elvis state. Um we
(23:59):
had done three things that you were not allowed to
do without permission. We had shown an image of Elvis,
we had used his lyrics, and we had also used
his music, and you can't do any of those things
about permission. So um so there there, there came a
day when we had we had to approach the Elvis
estate and they sent what we call the Memphis Mafia
(24:22):
down to look at the movie. And all these people
from the Elvis Estate traveled to California and they came
into the theater one day and I'll never forget most
of them were wearing dark glasses. They were wearing sunglasses
even in the movie theater. As they watched the movie.
It was exactly as you think it would be. And
they watched the movie and they came out and they said,
we're stoked, we love this movie. We're going to approve
(24:43):
all the stuff you want to do. And one of
the cool things we actually got a party at the
Elvis Estate after the movie was done, and Dane and
I received a key to the city of the City
of Memphis, and we got a private tour of the
Elvis of the state, and we even got a trip
to one of their archive buildings where they have all
of Elvis's actual stuff. There are four archive buildings. They
(25:06):
are in tornado proof structures. Um. One of them is
on the property and that's the one that we were
able to go into. And um we were there in
all these amongst all these shelves that had all these
archival boxes, and we were like, so, what's in all
of these? And they're like, well, a lot of stuff,
and and we said what do we look at? And
they said, well, I don't know, just pick a box,
(25:26):
and so Dean Dean picked a box and they opened
it up and they said, oh, these are all the
things that were on Elvis' countertop in his bathroom when
he died. And we simply packed them all up. And
they had a bottle of his high karate aftershave that
that he had used, and they opened it up and
let us smell it. And so we saw, we saw
some of his jumpsuits, we saw a pair of boxing
(25:48):
gloves that Muhammad Ali had given him. It was amazing. Anyway,
they were amazing. They were so kind and so generous,
and it was just such a great thing that we
we partnered with them. Anyway, one of those great lucky things.
One of my other favorite parts of the movie is
how Lilo is like a five six year old girl
but sometimes has like these really dark, almost much older
(26:10):
thoughts than her. How is that writing in things of
like leave me alone here to die? Like, how do
you kind of approach that to make it kind of
believable that it's a kid saying this? You know? Um?
That was Dean's line in Dean's scene. Dean also did
the he invented the whole my friends need to be
punished and she's taking those spoons in the in the
(26:30):
pit pull jar. That was just Dean and my sensibility.
But one of the things we had we did was
we um. Our voice actor was a girl named Debate Chase,
and we and we Um we auditioned a lot of
young actors to try to find the right voice. It
was one of those you'll know what when you know it,
And when Dvague came in, she had this really very
interesting way of delivering her lines. She had a little
(26:52):
bit of this sort of dead pan kind of delivery,
and we were like, that's Lilo, that's her. And so
it's one of those things that like you write it
and then you meet the voice, and hearing the voice
helps you write it, so it's this kind of a
snowball effect. But I must credit Demon for that really
great scene that was entirely his. He wrote it and
he even storyboarded it. So we've seen sequel Lelo Institch,
(27:15):
You've seen the TV series, but now with Disney Plus,
will there ever be any other installment of Lee Loo
and Stitch. I think there will be. I think that.
I mean, he's a very very popular character. One of
the things that has been very amazing is that um
I always hoped to pitch and create a movie that
had a character that really endured. And one of the
things that I absolutely am delighted with is whenever I
(27:36):
go to Disney um properties. I can go to Disney World,
or I can go to Disneyland, and you walk into
stores and there are not just Stitch products. Sometimes there
are entire sections of the store that are literally devoted
just to him. And that is just mind blowing and
I am so so proud of that. And it's so
(27:57):
weird too, because I'm like, I drew him one day
in Palm Springs. I have the first drawing of him,
and now he's been reproduced millions of times, and he'll
a lot a lot of times they'll be like a
product it'll have maheat Donald and Stitch and it's like,
oh my god, like he's really like he's there right.
So um, yeah, I've been writing little things because I thought,
(28:18):
you know, he's part of the Disney universe now. And
just a really quick side note, the whole ad campaign
that we introduced the movie with was an ad campaign
that Dean and I thought up in other like movie posters. Yes,
because as the movie was coming close to release and
we were thinking about how we were going to market it,
we were sitting around one day talking about this whole
thing and I said, out loud, isn't it weird? This
(28:39):
little character that we started all by ourselves is going
is about to invade the Disney Universe. And from now on,
when they do a lineup of Disney characters, Stitch will
always have to be in there with them. And the
idea like and at the idea of like, oh, him
invading the Disney universe, we all wouldn't it be funny
if we did the whole opening the Lion King and
when they helped the little cup up, it wasn't the cup,
but it stitch and everybody just ran away and the
(29:02):
whole idea just made us laugh. So we boarded that
out um, and we went to this meeting with Dick Cook,
who who was on the main line and he was
in charge of these things and he was an executive there,
and we pitched it and it got a big laugh.
Dick Cook said, I like this, and then they said,
can we do more? And so we started kicking around
(29:22):
ideas of having him show up in The Little Mermaid
and Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast and um, which
means we had to go back and re record those
actors with new lines. And that was really funny because
none of them were super stoked about it like they
I think it was the idea of it wasn't like
we didn't want to do it. They were very professional
(29:43):
and they were very, very generous, and he did a
great job. I think it was more the idea of, like,
what's this thing doing in my movie? And the funniest
one was when we recorded Bell. She was on speaker
phone and she was in New York, so we were
recording her remotely, and the funny thing was because she
was just on speaker phone, it was impossible not to
imagine that the actual Bell was it the other end
(30:06):
of the line talking to you, because you couldn't see her.
So in my mind, it's Bell, it's the cartoon character.
And I remember we staid, okay, this is what's this
is the idea which is gonna show up and he's
going to ruin your special dance with beasts and then
you're gonna say I'll be in my room and you're
and you're upset. And then there was a there was
a beat and she said, so I'm mad at him,
(30:28):
and he said, well, you're disappointed, right, and she'd go okay,
and so she would do the line and she said
I'll be in my room and she had this really
sort of upbeat delivery, and we said, well, I think
you're more disappointed than that, right. So we eventually got
to the place where she felt very, very upset, you know,
but it was just so sweet and so cute because
she was like, wait, a mad and it was just
(30:49):
it was so it was great and they were and
what again, it was so cool because I got to
meet those actors. I never thought i'd meet them, but
that was so cool. I mean, you created an iconic character,
got to work with people who are also iconic characters.
It's amazing to see that all come together. And I
can't wait to see you what comes next, and hopefully
(31:09):
I'll get to talk to you again once that comes around.
I really appreciate the time absolutely. If you ever wanted
to a follow up, I'm so sorry we were late
on this because but yeah, let's do that. That would
be fantastic. I really enjoyed chatting with you so much.
Let's thanks Chris. Have a good day, you two. I'll
talk to you soon. Let's get into it now. A
spoiler free review of Thor, Love and Thunder, my most
(31:32):
anticipated movie of the summer, didn't live up to my
expectations because you have Chris Hemsworth back in store, Taco
Y t t back directing this one who directed Thor Ragnarok,
and most importantly, you have Natalie Portman reprising her role
as Dr. Jane Foster. But not only that, she becomes
the mighty Thor in this movie. Not a spoiler, that's
(31:55):
all in the trailer. So before we get into what
I thought about this movie, here just a little bit
of that. Now. He was no ordinary man. He was
a God. After stating planet Earth for the five hundredth time,
Thaws it off on a new gene. Well, he got
in shape. He went from dead bard god, and after
(32:20):
all that, he reclaimed his touches as the one and
only four Oh spook too soon, Jane, and I have
to say, even though I knew it was coming, even
though I saw it in the trailer, at the moment
that Natalie Portman became Mighty Thor felt awesome to me.
(32:43):
I'll get into why I loved that part of the
movie and why I didn't like that part of the
movie all at the same time. But where this movie
takes place, it's Thore who is struggling to find inner peace.
He's trying to find himself. He doesn't want to be
Thor anymore. He's basically sad Thor, and he has transformed
since the last time we saw him, as Dad bought Thor.
(33:05):
And he's with his old friends, the Guardians of the Galaxy.
So you have Thour here struggling to find himself. But
above all, the evil that is approaching is a new
villain called Gore, the god Butcher, played by Christian Bale.
He is this galactic killer who is trying to kill
every single god around. It is Thor's mission now to
(33:26):
take down Gore, the god butcher, and he enlist the
help of King Valkyrie, his friend Cork, who is also
voiced by the director Taiko Watiti, and then of course
his ex girlfriend Jane Foster. Now, some people ask me,
do you have to watch all the other Thor movies
to understand this one? I don't think so. I think
this movie in particular does a really good job at
(33:49):
explaining the details you need to know about the relationship
between Jane and Thor. Obviously, with any Marvel movie, you
feel more invested if you've seen every other Marvel movie,
if you have all all the time to watch the
other three Thor movies, which I do enjoy. And I
say that because I believe that Thor actually has the
best solo movies, second only to Spider Man collectively. Now,
(34:12):
this being the fourth Thor movie, I think they have
the comedy. I think they have the action and even
coming full circle now on the love story. So I
find them the most entertaining now and the ones that
I feel I can continue on and on, especially after
this movie, and I had a lot of high expectations
going into this movie because of that, because he is
(34:34):
one of my favorite Marvel characters, and because I really
love Thor Ragnarok so much. I felt like Chris Hemsworth
really got the character down. The story was so perfect
in that movie, and visually that movie looks so amazing
and kind of created this own new identity for Thor
that I feel like that carried on through the rest
of the Avengers movies and now coming back to his
(34:56):
solo movies. That's why I was so excited for this one,
and this one really meant those expectations. I don't think
it exceeded them in any way, but it met them.
And much like Thor Ragnarok, this one was just as
visually appealing, and it kind of took a different approach
on the style. Where Ragnarok had this kind of cosmic
(35:16):
color palette, which was very defining to that, I felt
like this one was a little bit more comic book style,
especially when it came to the costume and a lot
of the wardrobe. I felt like Thor kind of went
back to that more classic Thor look that you get
in the first movie, and also just more representative of
what the comic books look like, and then you have
(35:38):
paired with that. What Thor movies do that no other
real Marvel movie can pull off is the comedy. This
movie is effortlessly funny to wear. Thor is actually a
funny character. That's unlike all the other Marvel Humor, which
for the most part is characters who aren't funny, that
say the occasional witty thing, the occasional like out of
(36:01):
place line that makes it funny. That's kind of what
Marvel humor has always been. When it comes to like
Captain America and Iron Man, they just say things that
you wouldn't expect them to say, and everybody lasts and
it's funny. This movie was, at the root of it
a romantic comedy, and I think that's why some people
don't like it. If you go into it expecting just
(36:22):
your average Marvel movie, the kind of formulaic thing that
they've been doing with all their superhero movies for a
while now, which has worked and which I've loved for
a very long time, but I'm kind of itching for
something a little bit different. This movie didn't stick to
that same type of formula, and what it really showed
me is that Marvel can kind of exist by making
movies in different genres and in different styles. I saw
(36:45):
that with Doctor Strange until the Multiverse of Madness, which
I didn't really love. I felt like that was Marvel's
attempt to make a Marvel horror movie. This one. At
the root of it, it really is a romantic comedy,
and then and you layer that with the superhero aspect,
and then you layer that with action, it becomes a
(37:06):
Marvel movie. So you just start checking off all the boxes. Here.
You have the action, you have the acting, you have
the characters, you have the costume, you have the humor.
All those things are exactly what I was looking for,
and then you wrap them up into the new thor aesthetic,
which I'm totally in love with and met all my expectations. Now,
the part of the movie that I didn't like is
(37:28):
it felt a little bit rushed within the first twenty
or thirty minutes, and this movie is under two hours,
which I don't find myself saying this a lot, but
I wish this movie was longer. I just felt the
movie was trying to find its footing early on and
kind of going between Gore the god Butcher's backstory into
where Thor is now into where Jane is. It was
(37:50):
kind of just like, Okay, what am I focusing on here?
And then the moment she becomes Mighty Thor, it goes
from just her being Dr Jane Foster. Now she's Mighty
Thor and everybody's just kind of cool with it. I
wanted to see a little bit more there of her
figuring out her powers, being a little bit more questioning
of what is going on. She just kind of turns
(38:11):
into Mighty Sore and everybody accepts it. The rest of
the movie kind of moves on, which does create a
pretty fast pace throughout the entire thing. So I felt
at the root of it it did help with everybody's
attention span of once you get kind of comfortable and
one thing, it's onto the next, onto the next. So
it had that kind of feeling to it. So while
some people are probably praising that a Marvel movie is
(38:32):
under two hours, this one I wouldn't have minded if
it would have gave like maybe twenty minutes more there
in that first act. And then when it comes to
the villain in this movie, Christian Bale. Great for him.
I love that they gave him a backstory and while
he is no Fano so by any means, he was
a pretty good threat, which Marvel tends to have a
(38:54):
lot of forgettable villains. I felt like this is one
that ten years down the road, I'm going to remember
Christian Bale as Gore, the god Butcher. And the only
thing I didn't love was I felt like they should
have given him more action sequences. I felt like his
character really shine whenever he was the most menacing, whenever
he felt like he was a very unstoppable force, like
(39:18):
something to really be reckoned with. But I never had
that moment in the movie that I felt like the
villain was completely in control. So basically my biggest criticisms
of the movie is that I wanted more. But I
guess as a Marvel fan, you want to leave us
wanting more, because I would go watch Thor five tomorrow
if it came out. I think Marvel fans will be
(39:40):
happy with this one, especially if you're a big thor fan,
which it's unusual to see movies get better with each installment,
especially when you're making a fourth one. Usually by the
third one you're like, all right, I'm ready to cut
the chord here, I'm all in for another Thor movie.
I think they have come a really far away since
(40:00):
the original Thor, which I did rewatch going into this movie,
which I still enjoy that movie. The only thing I
don't like looking back on it is how weird they
make Chris Hemsworth look in that movie, like he has
makeup and the hair and the wig just isn't completely there.
Now Thor's look is completely perfect, and I think Chris
Hemsworth should get a award for how ripped he got
(40:24):
for this movie. He said it's the most cut he's
ever been for any role, and it really shows. And
somebody like his counterpart in this movie, Christian Bale, who
is been praised for losing a crazy amount of weight
for roles, he's also put on a lot of weight
for roles and I feel like it only matters what
(40:44):
kind of movie you do to get praise for that,
because he did those both in dramas. But then you
have Chris Hemsworth getting like obliterated. So he actually looks
like a god in this movie, but that kind of
gets glossed over because it's a Marvel movie. Watched this
movie and see just how shredded he looks. The entire
time and try not to be impressed by it. I
(41:06):
think when it comes to ranking this among other Marvel movies,
it's getting really hard to compare. I'll be honest, we're
almost at thirty of these movies now, so I don't
think at this point it's fair to compare all of
these almost thirty movies. I try to just compare them
in phases, and in this last phase four easily top three.
(41:27):
In phase four for me, it's just always hard to
beat Spider Man, but this one comes pretty close and delivering.
Do you need to go watch this movie in theaters.
It's hard for me not to watch a Marvel movie
in theaters. I think that's where they really shine. I
still feel like they're sporting events. However, in my theater,
and myself included, I don't think there were particularly hype moments,
(41:49):
kind of what I was saying earlier about I wish
there was a little bit more adversity from the villain
and that struggle. I don't think there were a whole
lot of cheer moments in this movie, and I think
that makes it more of a reason to go watch
this in theaters, which that's kind of what I was
surprised by I wanted to have that big epic roar,
people clapping. There wasn't a whole lot of that. Maybe
(42:09):
it was just my theater's vibe. Maybe it was because
the dude next to me took his shoes off and
was barefoot next to me. Maybe that took a little
bit away from that. But that's why you go to
the movies. I still think it as an event. However,
I don't think the crowd was as electric as it
was for a movie like Spider Man No Way Home.
So if you weren't as excited about this movie is
(42:30):
maybe some of the other Marvel movies. You may wait
till it goes to Disney Plus. But if you do go,
do stay because there are two very important post credit scenes.
And finally, if I had to rate thor Love and Thunder,
I would give it four point five out of five
storm Breakers. I honestly thought this movie had the potential
(42:50):
to be my five out of five movie for the year.
Didn't quite get there. If it would have had a
bigger Harrah moment, probably could have made it to a
five out of five. But without a doubt, it is
crushing it at the box office right now made sixty
nine point nine million dollars and it's opening day alone
even more the night before that probably be the third
(43:11):
highest grossing movie of the year with a very good reason.
It's been a really great summer so far, or you know,
really only kicking off July, so I've been seeing so
many movies I can't even get them into all my
movie reviews. So that is it for this week's. Next week,
I'll finally get to my Elvis movie review, which I
haven't done yet, so have all that to look forward to.
(43:33):
What a summer blockbuster season, and that is going to
do it for another episode here on the podcast. I
feel like this episode has gone longer than expected with
the interview and I couldn't shut up about four Love
and Thunder. So I'm gonna punt the trailer park for
this week because a trailer drop that I'll probably spend
another ten minutes on. I'll just say that for next week.
(43:54):
But I can't skip the listeners shout out of the
week because I do it every single episode. So you
can tweet me at Mike d stro I love including
anytime somebody tweets a photo of you listening to the
podcast or in this case something movie related and I
gotta tweet. Recently after I did the Pixar Characters that
Deserve Solo films from Kyle Skew, and Kyle tweeted a
(44:18):
picture of him maybe a girlfriend or wife and they
were dressed up as the characters from UP, and Kyle wrote,
not want to jump on social media, but enjoy the podcast,
and I thought I would share a feeding photo from
the past weekend as we dressed up as the characters
from UP for a Disney themed party. Keep up the
great work hashtag movie Mix Movie podcast. First of all, Kyle,
(44:41):
I am envious that you have friends that to begin with,
I'm envious that you have friends, but also that you
have friends that throw Disney themed parties like that sounds
really fun to me. I would go to one of
those in a heartbeat. And your costumes look dope. The
only time I've ever dressed up as a Pixar character
was my very first Halloween. I was able to somehow
(45:04):
convince my parents to spend money on a woody costume,
and that's the only time in my life they've ever
spent money on a costume from Walmart, and sadly, I
outgrew that costume pretty quickly, so maybe someday I'll get
invited to one of these and reprise my role as Woody.
And second of all, really appreciate you listening to the
podcast and jumping on Twitter, which you say you normally
(45:27):
don't do, just to send me that. It's like going
an extra level there. So I appreciate that. Kyle. Hope
you had fun at the party and hope you keep
listening to the podcast. As to the rest of the
movie crew, I appreciate all the love and support, especially
when you comment on things that really helps me out.
And what I like to do is I like to
post videos for my interviews and create a secret emoji
(45:48):
that you can go and comment, because sometimes I know
it's just weird that you don't know what to say
to somebody even though you like the video and you
want to show your support, you can just drop a like.
But the secret emoji for this interview would I'll be
dropping a video of me talking to Chris Sanders, and
since Stitch is an alien, if you want to go
comment on the video on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok dropped the
(46:09):
alien emoji that is the secret emoji for this episode,
and I'll talk to you again next week here on
the podcast, and until then, go out and watch good movies.
Later
Hello, and welcome back to Movie Mike's movie podcast. I
am your host Movie Mike a very special episode for you.
This week, I have on Chris Sanders, who is the
creator of Leland Stitch. He is also the voice of Stitch,
which if you've been listening to this podcast for any
amount of time, you know that lel and Stitch is
my favorite Disney movie. So it was like getting to
(00:22):
talk to a hero on this week's episode. I'll also
give you my spoiler free movie review of thor Love
and Thunder, my most anticipated movie of the summer. We
have so much to get to on this episode. Always
no more of your time. If you guys in the
movie crew are ready, let's just get started. Let's talk movies.
In a world where everyone and their mother has a podcast,
(00:44):
one man stands to infiltrate the ears of listeners like
never before in a movie podcast. A man with so
much movie knowledge. He's basically like a walking AUDIMTV Who's
glasses from the Nashville Podcast Network Movie You may not
(01:04):
know his name, but you definitely know his work. My
guest this week is Chris Sanders, who is the creator
of Disney's Leelo and Stitch, he's also the voice of Stitch,
and long before he wrote and directed this movie in
two thousand and two, he also worked as a story
artist on Disney movies like The Rescuers, down Under, Beauty
(01:25):
and the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King and really got
his start when he was the head of the story
on Mulan. Working on that movie led to him pitching
his idea that he's had since the eighties of Lelo
and Stitch. Lelo and Stitch was his first hit as
a writer and director, and even after Leelo and Stitch,
he went on to write and direct animated movies like
(01:46):
How to Train Your Dragon and The Crudes. So he's
a super talented guy. If you're a fan of Lelo
and Stitch or just a fan of Disney, I think
you're gonna love his story. So let's talk movies with
Chris Sanders. I am on now with somebody I'm so
excited to talk to. I'm on with Chris Sanders. How
are you today? Good? How are you? I'm doing really
good now. A couple of things led me here to
(02:08):
having you on the podcast. Lilo and Stitch has been
my favorite Disney movie since I was a kid. And
earlier this year, I was scrolling through TikTok and I
see you there and I recognized you, and I didn't
realize the backstory of Lilo and Stitch and how it
came to be, so I knew once it hit that
twentieth anniversary, I had to reach out to you to
get you on the podcast. Cool. Yeah, it's been really
(02:28):
nice to do those TikTok's and um, that was just
a response to I don't remember what it was exactly,
but I ran across somebody who really didn't know anything
about where the movie came from, and that was that
wake up call to me realizing how much time had
gone by and quite a few people didn't know the
backstory to it. So it's been really fun to begin
(02:48):
that series dressing up someone the material, which a lot
of this stuff, just with animators and animation, a lot
of stuff ends up in people's garages. You know, there's
a lot of stuff in the archives. But I still
have the original drawings and the original manuscripts that I
used to pitch the project. So um, that's amongst the
stuff that I was digging up and beginning to put
up on on TikTok. So that people could take a
(03:11):
look at it, and that's so cool to see. And
I want to get to the movie, but I kind
of want to start back at the beginning. When you
were growing up in Colorado, what made you fall in
love with animation? I loved straw. My dad, I thought,
was a great artist. He did paintings and he would
draw like these buck Grudgers style spaceships. And I remember
one day he said, there's a limit to what you
(03:32):
can build, but you can draw anything. And that really
stuck with me, and um, and so I really I
always had a love to a love of drawing. It
didn't occur to me that I could turn that into
a career. And tell you know, many years later, I
was nearing the end of high school, trying to figure
out what to do with the rest of my life,
and my grandmother was reading an article in the Denver Post,
which was our local newspaper, and she was reading this
(03:55):
article all about how Disney Studios was running low on animators.
They were retiring, and they were looking for a way
to replenish their ranks. They created an animation program at
this school in California called the cal Arts And I thought, oh,
my gosh, that's where I want to go. So I'd
always liked animation, I'd enjoyed it, but I've never thought
(04:15):
of it as a possible career path until she told
me about that school. And that's the only place I applied.
How did you know you were? It went from just
you just drawing to like, oh, I'm actually pretty good
at this, Like this is something I could actually pursue
and go to that school. You don't know, Um, I
was really crossing my fingers that my drawings were good enough.
I think a lot of kids at cal Arts were
(04:38):
like some of the local best artists from where they
came from, so I was not unusual in that. Like
I did cartoons for my school newspaper, so when they
needed cartoons, people would come to me at at our
Vata High School and um, you know, when they needed
a mascot drawn or a T shirt drawn or something
like that. Likewise, a lot of the kids I ended
up within my classic cal Arts same kind of thing.
(05:00):
And that was really sobering because like, I went from
being I thought a person who could draw pretty well
to being so bird. When I'm sitting next to somebody
named Kelly Asbury, Kelly Asbury keep a good friend of mine,
and he just drew so much better than I did.
I thought he just drew amazingly well. And he drew
with a pen because he had this confidence, and I
always drew a pencil because I was never really sure.
(05:20):
I was like, I want to erase this and move
things around. And he took out this ink pen and
he would just draw what he wanted and I'm like,
oh my gosh, he's so much better than I am,
right um, And you know it's still that way. I
think one of the things that's really cool about the
animation industry is that if you ever are looking for inspiration,
just walk down the hall. There's somebody down that hall
that's gonna be way better at stuff than you are,
(05:41):
and so inspiration to bounced. I mean, in turn, that
makes you become better. You see other people just crushing
it and you're like, I want to get to that level.
I want to be that good too. I want to
creak out my best idea so I can get the
better jobs and get the things I want to achieve. Right,
absolutely absolutely, because nobody, I mean there's no nobody draws
the back. Everybody draws you know their own things in
(06:02):
their own ways and stuff like that, and it's that great.
It's that great coming together of all those different artistic
styles where you can get these wonderful films and you
get these wonderful projects and stuff like that. If I
went back in time and and changed out one single
artist on one of these films, the film would be
a little bit different. So they are. They're literally a
conglomeration of the talents that were gathered for that particular project.
(06:24):
So you go out to this school and how long
is it until you get your first page job to
where Okay, this is turning into my career. A lot
of people would leave school at that time early. A
lot of people graduated on their third year. Um I didn't.
I stuck with it for four years. I was very
aware that this is my last chance to go to
school before I would go and start working for the
(06:45):
rest of my life. So I hung in there for
the four years. At the time that I graduated, Oddly enough,
Disney Studios was no longer hiring, so the place I
was really hoping to go was not an option at
that point. So I did find a job at Marvel Productions.
Now that wasn't the comic book part of Marvel. It
was the animation side of it, and they did Saturday
(07:05):
Morning cartoons. I got a job on The Muppet Babies. Now,
the funny thing about that is that one of the
things that he would always tell us in cal Arts
is draw, draw, draw, draw every day, draw things that
you see around you. It'll make you a better artist. Well,
I didn't want to draw the things I saw around me.
I didn't want to draw shares, I didn't want to
draw tables. I didn't want to draw people's shoes, you know.
I wanted to draw the stuff that I wanted to draw.
(07:25):
The funny thing is, at Marvel Productions on The Muppet
Baby's Show, I was in the model department, which meant
anything that was going to be in the cartoon had
to be drawn first as a turn so that they
could color it and model it and send it overseas
so that everything would be on model. So the funny
thing is my first job was really drawing things that
I had avoided drawing in the past. I drew chairs
(07:48):
and tables and shoes and dresses and everyday objects, a
lot of them, right, And it was amazing training. So
you're working at Marvel, and I saw that you said
that you had the first drawing a stitch in n
What about that story? What about that sketch made you
come back to it years later when you finally get
(08:08):
this opportunity to create this story for Disney. I had
worked a little bit on it in private. I wanted
us to do a children's book. And what I realized
after working on it for a while in private, you know,
on my own time, was that the story was too
big to fit into a normally formatted children's book. I
didn't think I could boil this thing down to stay
seventeen pages or thirty two pages. It just seemed too big.
(08:30):
Um So, the idea was bigger than my book. Um So,
years later, I was in the waning days of the
production of Mulan. We made that film at the Florida Studio.
So I was out in Florida, and the president of
Feature Animation at that time, Tom Schumacher, was out visiting,
and um, he and I and everybody had gone through
a lot making this film. It had been quite the adventure.
(08:53):
I think that my performance on that film had earned me,
had earned me a certain amount of I guess latitude
to maybe do my own movie. And Tom was out
visiting Florida and he said, is there anything that you
would want to do next? And pretty much right there
at dinner, I said, no, no, not well wait a minute, okay,
(09:14):
you know there is this one thing. There was this story, right,
and so I was able to think about it for
a little bit. And the next time he visited, he said, well,
and I was trying to work up a pitch for it,
you know, and and uh, and he said, well, go ahead,
just tell me about it. And I said, well, I'm
not really ready, and he goes, no, just come on,
just do it, you know, And I thought, here he
goes my idea. I mean, I'm like, it's it's gonna
(09:34):
be all over the next like in the next three minutes.
And I pitched it, just verbally threw it out there,
and I really got my very first and biggest note
of all, which was the story that I had concocted
was all about this strange little creature who was living
in a forest and he didn't he had come from.
He was a mystery to everything around him, but he
was also a bit of a mystery to himself. And
(09:54):
the story was all about how he was figuring out
who he was, and he was frightening looking a bit
of a monster, right, And Tom said, I like this story,
but I would have a suggestion. The animal world is
in a sense already alien to us, so placing this
alien being in the animal world doesn't get you the
kind of contrast that you might want. I would suggest
(10:15):
you placed this monster in the human world. Boom, there
it was. I thought that was a great idea. So
that was the first biggest note that Lelo and Stitch
ever got. Now this is before it was Lelo and Stitch,
before they were in Hawaii. That was when I left
and started working on the idea. Once I returned to California,
and that's where I got. I got this uh motel
room out in Palm Springs at this resort, and I
(10:37):
locked on myself in this room for three days and
all I did was draw and write because I wanted
to create a bit of a document because it was
going to be about an alien. And I thought, you
know what, those are the days where people were making
a lot of monstery kind of alien movies. And I thought,
if you say the word alien in a development meeting
or a pitch, A lot of people are going to
get this instant idea of what an alien is. And
(10:58):
I thought, Okay, if I don't draw this, they're gonna
get maybe the wrong idea. So if I draw this
whole thing out and they say no to it, at
least they're saying no to the idea that was my idea,
so it's a legitimate no. So um. So, after those
three days, what occurred to me was that in a sense,
I had finally created that children's book that I had
(11:19):
tried to create so many years before and had abandoned.
That's really interesting to me because I was rewatching it
and I realized how hard it must have been to
pitch an idea about this alien creature doesn't really say
a whole lot of words. So to hear you say
that you took that idea, placed it into Hawaii, and
suddenly it made sense. You know, this is where you've
(11:40):
really got to understand, like how important the producer and
ahead of a studio are to your future. They can
make or break an idea. And in this case, Tom Schumacher,
he wanted to make this film and he that was
the next big thing was that it's a's the thing
I'm going to put on a TikTok really soon, and
I'm working on that one right now. He told me
(12:00):
after the development department looked at it, that they all
like universally liked the idea, and he said I watched
into his office, into his office, and he said, I
will make this film on one condition that it looked
like you drew it. And that was, you know, very
exciting and flattering. But at that point I didn't even
know what to do because I thought, well, what do
I even draw like? I just draw like everybody else.
(12:21):
A girl who was working at the studios to Nichols,
who was an amazing artist. She also came from cal Arts.
She did a two week analysis of my art style
and she created two documents called Surfing the Sanders Style,
and it explained how I drew well. Nobody was more
interested to read these than I was, and I was
absolutely fascinated. It turns out there were things that were
(12:45):
governing my style that existed that I didn't really even
realize that I was doing, but she saw them and
she had like dissected the whole thing. So that began,
and that's one of the reasons that Leelo and Stitch
is a highly unusual film. It is more unusual than
people really, I think may may realize, because it is
not only a very Miyazaki style story that is extremely
(13:08):
hard to mail down. You know, it's a smaller story,
and it's really kind of strange, based very very much
on quirky, unusual characters. Really, you know, these personalities are
the are the whole movie. But also that it's in
an individual artists style, and that's I don't think there's
anything that has happened really before or since, at least
with an artist inside the studio they've based films on,
(13:31):
say like Isaac Isaac u Ivan Girl. Sleeping Beauty is
based very much on Ivan Girl, for example. Um but
he was an outside creator. So it's one of the
reasons that that's such an unusual film. So when do
you sit down to create what is going to be
Lelo and Stitch, you have to create Lilo. When did
it get that title? When did they get that final art?
(13:51):
It was Lelo and Stitch by the time it was
in that first pitch book. So when I went away
to Palm Springs, by that point I had made the
decision to place the film in Hawaii. I had named
the characters Leelo and Stitch, and I had no connections
to Hawaii at that point. So I pulled Leelo's name
off of a roadmap that I had from Hawaii. There's
a Lil Lane and I saw that. So this is
(14:13):
one of the strange things. I didn't know what that
word meant. It sounded like a name. It turns out
it's not a name, but it's the It's the word
for lost. So in a really strange way, I found
the right word to make that her name. The same
with Nanni, I just again I looked around for names
on a roadmap. Later on in the making of the film,
(14:36):
we did engage as many people as we could from
Hawaii because we're toughing about it. We're trotting into a
culture that we are not part of, and if you're
going to do that, you really have to connect with
people that know what the deal is, that know what
they're doing for the music, for the culture, for the dialogue,
for your voices, as much as you can. So um
(14:56):
and so we did. We met a huge number of
people who came our guides to making the film be respectful.
Going into the start of making this movie. At what
point did you become the voice of Stitch? Were you
always going to be Stitch or was that a voice
that just existed in your head? Where did that come from?
It's sort of both. It was it was a voice.
I had used this up to that point to call
(15:17):
people on the telephone with and annoy them. UM. And
it was actually Dean, my co director. So along the
lines of your last question, one of the first things
you do is you find a co director that you trust,
and I had learned to trust Dean into partment, into
partner with Dean during the making of Mulan and Dean
was extremely smart and amazing, a natural and it came
to storytelling, he was a natural storyteller, a great writer,
(15:41):
a wonderful story artist. UM. And he has very good
structural knowledge and structural instincts. So so I partnered with
him immediately. Um. As soon as we decided to do
the project, I saw out and we we agreed to
co direct on the film. Dean's suggested that I be
the voice of Stitch. One of the main reasons was
(16:02):
that we wanted Originally we didn't want Stitch to even speak.
We were like, oh, it's gonna be like dumb, but
we'll do the whole film and he will just be
a character that works in pandomime. Later on, it became
obvious that he was going to have to speak, and
in fact, he would have some key lines during the film. Well,
at that point we thought, okay, we're gonna we're gonna
have to get a voice, but you don't want to
(16:22):
necessarily hire somebody like Robert Redford or Danny DeVito and
then worry about like, well, how is the studio going
to react when they realize this character only says like
fifteen things, and will they then start to push for like, well,
if you know, if we're gonna hire Robert Redford, we
want to you know, we want Robert Redford. We want
like a lot of lines. And we were afraid that
that might begin to really be the tail that wagged
the dog as far as the making of the film.
(16:44):
So Dean suggested, He's like, you know what, why didn't
you just do the voice? You used that voice when
you pitch your boards, So why don't you just do it?
And then we'll avoid any problem because you know, you're
not a real actor. Nobody's no one's gonna ask for
more of you, right. So we didn't do that at
and there came up a moment. There was only one
moment that I felt a little stressed about it, and
that was when we realized that near the very end
(17:07):
of the film, Stitch would have this one very important
line where he talks about this family that he found.
And it was little and it was broken, but it
was still good and that verged on real acting, and
so I thought, I don't know if I can do this.
On that day, I came to Dean and I said, today,
I'm an actor, and you're going to be the director,
the only director, and I'm going to go in that booth,
(17:29):
and you tell me what to do and I'll do it.
And if I can't pull this off, then we'll find
somebody else to do the voice. And so we did.
Like Dean directed me, I did everything he asked, and
before long he said, okay, I think we got it.
And I said, are you sure? And he said, yeah,
I think we got it. And it worked. Okay, you
brought up my favorite scene in the entire movie. I
think it's because of that. It's that moment in the
(17:51):
movie where everything kind of hits me emotionally and I
remember watching it as a kid and having that same
kind of feeling of Stitch, of being that person who
was filled with ray age in a place that he
didn't understand, didn't understand himself, but all of a sudden
he had this family. Now, I think that's the most
perfect scene in any Disney movie I've seen. So it's
cool how that came together. And now you had to
go dig out your acting abilities in that. I did
(18:14):
my best. I really tried hard to that day. I
still remember that day. This is my family. I found
it on my own, this little and broken but still good. Yeah,
still good. So when people find out you're the voice
of Stitch, do they immediately ask you to do it?
(18:34):
I get asked to do it a lot. It was there.
I had some surgery on my neck at one point
period of time about a year I couldn't do it,
But then I got back to doing it, and I
still do it. I get called up about at least
once a month to come in and do I do
voices for toys and for like parades, things for cruise ships,
all Disney stuff. It's fun. I told myself if I
(18:55):
ever had you on the podcast, I would show you
my voice, and it's actually that scene that I do.
So I would like to let you hear this and
then judge my abilities afterwards and let me know how
I can make it better. All right, okay, all right,
So it's that scene, this Lis my family. I found
it all on my own. It's little I'm broken, but
(19:16):
still good. Yeah, still good. How's that? That's really good?
That's very nice. How do you get the laugh though,
because I've been trying this impression for a while, but
that laugh is and like it's hard to do. The
big laugh is painful. That that is one if you're
doing a recording special, you save that for the very end,
like okay, we'll save all the screaming and the laughs
(19:37):
for the end, and then well we'll do Then you
can just take it to the wall and if you
blow your voice to out, you're fine. The fact that
it being the twentieth anniversary of the movie, when you
go back, what moment sticks out to you as being
the most fun part of the entire process When the
part of the process that I've always loved is music.
(19:59):
Dean and I and Leoo and Stitch was a big
part of this have really I've always loved music, and
and I listened to music. I have never written a
scene in a movie without listening to music while I
worked on that scene. I have also boarded pieces of
movies to music, and there are still there are still
pieces of music that if you play them while you
watch a piece of a Disney movie, it lines up
(20:21):
pretty much exactly. Um, Like, if you go to the
soundtrack for a movie called The Mission, there's a there's
a track from that. I believe it. I believe the
track is The Mission. And um, if you listen to
that while you watch the scene where Moue Foster's ghost
speaks to Simba, it works really really well because that's
the that's the music I I listened to when I
(20:42):
boarded the scene, and I pitched that scene to the
directors with that music. There are scenes in Beauty and
the Beast. I can show you the music that those
were done too. So anyway, so same with Leoland Stitch.
I would listen to music because I write these scenes.
And nothing was more exciting to us than we would
when we would partner with somebody like Allen Silvestri, who
is going to be writing a score. And one of
the things that Leland. Stitch was made for a lower
(21:04):
budget than movies were being made for at the time.
We felt we could buy our story freedom by lowering
the budget, which is exactly what happened. But one of
the things that both you and I told the producer
is going to ask the studio carve off enough money
to buy the best score money can buy, and we
will make the film for whatever is left over. And
that's exactly what they did. So we got Allen Selvestry
(21:26):
and it was this really important day um where we
were looking at the boards and Allen selvester was looking
at the whole film on boards and looking at the outline,
and he said, I really like this movie, and he
had a few suggestions, but he said, there's one thing
I didn't see. I didn't see the moment where Stitch
turns from bad to good, because the Stitch is a
villain that becomes a hero, and that was what the baseis.
(21:47):
That was really the basis of the whole story. He's
the first and I think at this point still the
only Disney villain who then becomes the hero of the story.
And Allan was like, well, where does that happen? And
both Dean and I at that point we're like, oh, well, yeah,
we tried to write it, we couldn't really figure it out.
And it sort of happens here, kind of between these
two shots, and suddenly both died, and I think we're
(22:08):
confronted with the reality that we hadn't really been able
to put it up there on the boards. And I'll
never forget what Allen said. We basically told Alan we
didn't know how to do it, and he said, put
her on screen and I'll do it. And I guess
we were saying we couldn't, we didn't know how to
say it, and he said, put it on screen and
I'll say it, and he said it with music. And
so there's a moment where Nannie realizes that they can't
(22:30):
retrieve Lil and she's crying and Stitches watching her, and
if you listen, there's a subtle change in the music
and Stitch walks up to her and he speaks to her,
and that's the moment of change. And what we realized
at that point was that music does the heaviest lifting
of all when it comes to story, and music is unassailable.
(22:54):
No one's going to laugh at music. You can you
can throw an awkward line in or an awkward shot
and it gets an in vertent laugh and you've kind
of blown it. But nobody laughed in music and um,
so Alan just like taught us such an incredibly important
lesson that day and we really took that to heart.
So later on one DNA and I were working on
How to Train Your Dragon. One of the first things
we do now is we carve out a house for
(23:16):
music in different places in the film. So in How
to Train Your Dragon, in that scene where Hiccup is
going to um bond and and and and um, he's
going to cross this divide and form a connection to
this dragon, no dialogue, it's all music, and we just
the characters shut up. All the characters shut up, and
(23:37):
music takes over. And that's just something that Dina and
I really believe in now. And we learned that on
Lelan Stitch. So was the love for Elvis music always
a part of the story or did that come along
when you're trying to find the music. I was a
big Elvis fan, so I simply gave that. I imprinted
that on Lelo and it was really cool because we
actually had to engage with the Elvis state. Um we
(23:59):
had done three things that you were not allowed to
do without permission. We had shown an image of Elvis,
we had used his lyrics, and we had also used
his music, and you can't do any of those things
about permission. So um so there there, there came a
day when we had we had to approach the Elvis
estate and they sent what we call the Memphis Mafia
(24:22):
down to look at the movie. And all these people
from the Elvis Estate traveled to California and they came
into the theater one day and I'll never forget most
of them were wearing dark glasses. They were wearing sunglasses
even in the movie theater. As they watched the movie.
It was exactly as you think it would be. And
they watched the movie and they came out and they said,
we're stoked, we love this movie. We're going to approve
(24:43):
all the stuff you want to do. And one of
the cool things we actually got a party at the
Elvis Estate after the movie was done, and Dane and
I received a key to the city of the City
of Memphis, and we got a private tour of the
Elvis of the state, and we even got a trip
to one of their archive buildings where they have all
of Elvis's actual stuff. There are four archive buildings. They
(25:06):
are in tornado proof structures. Um. One of them is
on the property and that's the one that we were
able to go into. And um we were there in
all these amongst all these shelves that had all these
archival boxes, and we were like, so, what's in all
of these? And they're like, well, a lot of stuff,
and and we said what do we look at? And
they said, well, I don't know, just pick a box,
(25:26):
and so Dean Dean picked a box and they opened
it up and they said, oh, these are all the
things that were on Elvis' countertop in his bathroom when
he died. And we simply packed them all up. And
they had a bottle of his high karate aftershave that
that he had used, and they opened it up and
let us smell it. And so we saw, we saw
some of his jumpsuits, we saw a pair of boxing
(25:48):
gloves that Muhammad Ali had given him. It was amazing. Anyway,
they were amazing. They were so kind and so generous,
and it was just such a great thing that we
we partnered with them. Anyway, one of those great lucky things.
One of my other favorite parts of the movie is
how Lilo is like a five six year old girl
but sometimes has like these really dark, almost much older
(26:10):
thoughts than her. How is that writing in things of
like leave me alone here to die? Like, how do
you kind of approach that to make it kind of
believable that it's a kid saying this? You know? Um?
That was Dean's line in Dean's scene. Dean also did
the he invented the whole my friends need to be
punished and she's taking those spoons in the in the
(26:30):
pit pull jar. That was just Dean and my sensibility.
But one of the things we had we did was
we um. Our voice actor was a girl named Debate Chase,
and we and we Um we auditioned a lot of
young actors to try to find the right voice. It
was one of those you'll know what when you know it,
And when Dvague came in, she had this really very
interesting way of delivering her lines. She had a little
(26:52):
bit of this sort of dead pan kind of delivery,
and we were like, that's Lilo, that's her. And so
it's one of those things that like you write it
and then you meet the voice, and hearing the voice
helps you write it, so it's this kind of a
snowball effect. But I must credit Demon for that really
great scene that was entirely his. He wrote it and
he even storyboarded it. So we've seen sequel Lelo Institch,
(27:15):
You've seen the TV series, but now with Disney Plus,
will there ever be any other installment of Lee Loo
and Stitch. I think there will be. I think that.
I mean, he's a very very popular character. One of
the things that has been very amazing is that um
I always hoped to pitch and create a movie that
had a character that really endured. And one of the
things that I absolutely am delighted with is whenever I
(27:36):
go to Disney um properties. I can go to Disney World,
or I can go to Disneyland, and you walk into
stores and there are not just Stitch products. Sometimes there
are entire sections of the store that are literally devoted
just to him. And that is just mind blowing and
I am so so proud of that. And it's so
(27:57):
weird too, because I'm like, I drew him one day
in Palm Springs. I have the first drawing of him,
and now he's been reproduced millions of times, and he'll
a lot a lot of times they'll be like a
product it'll have maheat Donald and Stitch and it's like,
oh my god, like he's really like he's there right.
So um, yeah, I've been writing little things because I thought,
(28:18):
you know, he's part of the Disney universe now. And
just a really quick side note, the whole ad campaign
that we introduced the movie with was an ad campaign
that Dean and I thought up in other like movie posters. Yes,
because as the movie was coming close to release and
we were thinking about how we were going to market it,
we were sitting around one day talking about this whole
thing and I said, out loud, isn't it weird? This
(28:39):
little character that we started all by ourselves is going
is about to invade the Disney Universe. And from now on,
when they do a lineup of Disney characters, Stitch will
always have to be in there with them. And the
idea like and at the idea of like, oh, him
invading the Disney universe, we all wouldn't it be funny
if we did the whole opening the Lion King and
when they helped the little cup up, it wasn't the cup,
but it stitch and everybody just ran away and the
(29:02):
whole idea just made us laugh. So we boarded that
out um, and we went to this meeting with Dick Cook,
who who was on the main line and he was
in charge of these things and he was an executive there,
and we pitched it and it got a big laugh.
Dick Cook said, I like this, and then they said,
can we do more? And so we started kicking around
(29:22):
ideas of having him show up in The Little Mermaid
and Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast and um, which
means we had to go back and re record those
actors with new lines. And that was really funny because
none of them were super stoked about it like they
I think it was the idea of it wasn't like
we didn't want to do it. They were very professional
(29:43):
and they were very, very generous, and he did a
great job. I think it was more the idea of, like,
what's this thing doing in my movie? And the funniest
one was when we recorded Bell. She was on speaker
phone and she was in New York, so we were
recording her remotely, and the funny thing was because she
was just on speaker phone, it was impossible not to
imagine that the actual Bell was it the other end
(30:06):
of the line talking to you, because you couldn't see her.
So in my mind, it's Bell, it's the cartoon character.
And I remember we staid, okay, this is what's this
is the idea which is gonna show up and he's
going to ruin your special dance with beasts and then
you're gonna say I'll be in my room and you're
and you're upset. And then there was a there was
a beat and she said, so I'm mad at him,
(30:28):
and he said, well, you're disappointed, right, and she'd go okay,
and so she would do the line and she said
I'll be in my room and she had this really
sort of upbeat delivery, and we said, well, I think
you're more disappointed than that, right. So we eventually got
to the place where she felt very, very upset, you know,
but it was just so sweet and so cute because
she was like, wait, a mad and it was just
(30:49):
it was so it was great and they were and
what again, it was so cool because I got to
meet those actors. I never thought i'd meet them, but
that was so cool. I mean, you created an iconic character,
got to work with people who are also iconic characters.
It's amazing to see that all come together. And I
can't wait to see you what comes next, and hopefully
(31:09):
I'll get to talk to you again once that comes around.
I really appreciate the time absolutely. If you ever wanted
to a follow up, I'm so sorry we were late
on this because but yeah, let's do that. That would
be fantastic. I really enjoyed chatting with you so much.
Let's thanks Chris. Have a good day, you two. I'll
talk to you soon. Let's get into it now. A
spoiler free review of Thor, Love and Thunder, my most
(31:32):
anticipated movie of the summer, didn't live up to my
expectations because you have Chris Hemsworth back in store, Taco
Y t t back directing this one who directed Thor Ragnarok,
and most importantly, you have Natalie Portman reprising her role
as Dr. Jane Foster. But not only that, she becomes
the mighty Thor in this movie. Not a spoiler, that's
(31:55):
all in the trailer. So before we get into what
I thought about this movie, here just a little bit
of that. Now. He was no ordinary man. He was
a God. After stating planet Earth for the five hundredth time,
Thaws it off on a new gene. Well, he got
in shape. He went from dead bard god, and after
(32:20):
all that, he reclaimed his touches as the one and
only four Oh spook too soon, Jane, and I have
to say, even though I knew it was coming, even
though I saw it in the trailer, at the moment
that Natalie Portman became Mighty Thor felt awesome to me.
(32:43):
I'll get into why I loved that part of the
movie and why I didn't like that part of the
movie all at the same time. But where this movie
takes place, it's Thore who is struggling to find inner peace.
He's trying to find himself. He doesn't want to be
Thor anymore. He's basically sad Thor, and he has transformed
since the last time we saw him, as Dad bought Thor.
(33:05):
And he's with his old friends, the Guardians of the Galaxy.
So you have Thour here struggling to find himself. But
above all, the evil that is approaching is a new
villain called Gore, the god Butcher, played by Christian Bale.
He is this galactic killer who is trying to kill
every single god around. It is Thor's mission now to
(33:26):
take down Gore, the god butcher, and he enlist the
help of King Valkyrie, his friend Cork, who is also
voiced by the director Taiko Watiti, and then of course
his ex girlfriend Jane Foster. Now, some people ask me,
do you have to watch all the other Thor movies
to understand this one? I don't think so. I think
this movie in particular does a really good job at
(33:49):
explaining the details you need to know about the relationship
between Jane and Thor. Obviously, with any Marvel movie, you
feel more invested if you've seen every other Marvel movie,
if you have all all the time to watch the
other three Thor movies, which I do enjoy. And I
say that because I believe that Thor actually has the
best solo movies, second only to Spider Man collectively. Now,
(34:12):
this being the fourth Thor movie, I think they have
the comedy. I think they have the action and even
coming full circle now on the love story. So I
find them the most entertaining now and the ones that
I feel I can continue on and on, especially after
this movie, and I had a lot of high expectations
going into this movie because of that, because he is
(34:34):
one of my favorite Marvel characters, and because I really
love Thor Ragnarok so much. I felt like Chris Hemsworth
really got the character down. The story was so perfect
in that movie, and visually that movie looks so amazing
and kind of created this own new identity for Thor
that I feel like that carried on through the rest
of the Avengers movies and now coming back to his
(34:56):
solo movies. That's why I was so excited for this one,
and this one really meant those expectations. I don't think
it exceeded them in any way, but it met them.
And much like Thor Ragnarok, this one was just as
visually appealing, and it kind of took a different approach
on the style. Where Ragnarok had this kind of cosmic
(35:16):
color palette, which was very defining to that, I felt
like this one was a little bit more comic book style,
especially when it came to the costume and a lot
of the wardrobe. I felt like Thor kind of went
back to that more classic Thor look that you get
in the first movie, and also just more representative of
what the comic books look like, and then you have
(35:38):
paired with that. What Thor movies do that no other
real Marvel movie can pull off is the comedy. This
movie is effortlessly funny to wear. Thor is actually a
funny character. That's unlike all the other Marvel Humor, which
for the most part is characters who aren't funny, that
say the occasional witty thing, the occasional like out of
(36:01):
place line that makes it funny. That's kind of what
Marvel humor has always been. When it comes to like
Captain America and Iron Man, they just say things that
you wouldn't expect them to say, and everybody lasts and
it's funny. This movie was, at the root of it
a romantic comedy, and I think that's why some people
don't like it. If you go into it expecting just
(36:22):
your average Marvel movie, the kind of formulaic thing that
they've been doing with all their superhero movies for a
while now, which has worked and which I've loved for
a very long time, but I'm kind of itching for
something a little bit different. This movie didn't stick to
that same type of formula, and what it really showed
me is that Marvel can kind of exist by making
movies in different genres and in different styles. I saw
(36:45):
that with Doctor Strange until the Multiverse of Madness, which
I didn't really love. I felt like that was Marvel's
attempt to make a Marvel horror movie. This one. At
the root of it, it really is a romantic comedy,
and then and you layer that with the superhero aspect,
and then you layer that with action, it becomes a
(37:06):
Marvel movie. So you just start checking off all the boxes. Here.
You have the action, you have the acting, you have
the characters, you have the costume, you have the humor.
All those things are exactly what I was looking for,
and then you wrap them up into the new thor aesthetic,
which I'm totally in love with and met all my expectations. Now,
the part of the movie that I didn't like is
(37:28):
it felt a little bit rushed within the first twenty
or thirty minutes, and this movie is under two hours,
which I don't find myself saying this a lot, but
I wish this movie was longer. I just felt the
movie was trying to find its footing early on and
kind of going between Gore the god Butcher's backstory into
where Thor is now into where Jane is. It was
(37:50):
kind of just like, Okay, what am I focusing on here?
And then the moment she becomes Mighty Thor, it goes
from just her being Dr Jane Foster. Now she's Mighty
Thor and everybody's just kind of cool with it. I
wanted to see a little bit more there of her
figuring out her powers, being a little bit more questioning
of what is going on. She just kind of turns
(38:11):
into Mighty Sore and everybody accepts it. The rest of
the movie kind of moves on, which does create a
pretty fast pace throughout the entire thing. So I felt
at the root of it it did help with everybody's
attention span of once you get kind of comfortable and
one thing, it's onto the next, onto the next. So
it had that kind of feeling to it. So while
some people are probably praising that a Marvel movie is
(38:32):
under two hours, this one I wouldn't have minded if
it would have gave like maybe twenty minutes more there
in that first act. And then when it comes to
the villain in this movie, Christian Bale. Great for him.
I love that they gave him a backstory and while
he is no Fano so by any means, he was
a pretty good threat, which Marvel tends to have a
(38:54):
lot of forgettable villains. I felt like this is one
that ten years down the road, I'm going to remember
Christian Bale as Gore, the god Butcher. And the only
thing I didn't love was I felt like they should
have given him more action sequences. I felt like his
character really shine whenever he was the most menacing, whenever
he felt like he was a very unstoppable force, like
(39:18):
something to really be reckoned with. But I never had
that moment in the movie that I felt like the
villain was completely in control. So basically my biggest criticisms
of the movie is that I wanted more. But I
guess as a Marvel fan, you want to leave us
wanting more, because I would go watch Thor five tomorrow
if it came out. I think Marvel fans will be
(39:40):
happy with this one, especially if you're a big thor fan,
which it's unusual to see movies get better with each installment,
especially when you're making a fourth one. Usually by the
third one you're like, all right, I'm ready to cut
the chord here, I'm all in for another Thor movie.
I think they have come a really far away since
(40:00):
the original Thor, which I did rewatch going into this movie,
which I still enjoy that movie. The only thing I
don't like looking back on it is how weird they
make Chris Hemsworth look in that movie, like he has
makeup and the hair and the wig just isn't completely there.
Now Thor's look is completely perfect, and I think Chris
Hemsworth should get a award for how ripped he got
(40:24):
for this movie. He said it's the most cut he's
ever been for any role, and it really shows. And
somebody like his counterpart in this movie, Christian Bale, who
is been praised for losing a crazy amount of weight
for roles, he's also put on a lot of weight
for roles and I feel like it only matters what
(40:44):
kind of movie you do to get praise for that,
because he did those both in dramas. But then you
have Chris Hemsworth getting like obliterated. So he actually looks
like a god in this movie, but that kind of
gets glossed over because it's a Marvel movie. Watched this
movie and see just how shredded he looks. The entire
time and try not to be impressed by it. I
(41:06):
think when it comes to ranking this among other Marvel movies,
it's getting really hard to compare. I'll be honest, we're
almost at thirty of these movies now, so I don't
think at this point it's fair to compare all of
these almost thirty movies. I try to just compare them
in phases, and in this last phase four easily top three.
(41:27):
In phase four for me, it's just always hard to
beat Spider Man, but this one comes pretty close and delivering.
Do you need to go watch this movie in theaters.
It's hard for me not to watch a Marvel movie
in theaters. I think that's where they really shine. I
still feel like they're sporting events. However, in my theater,
and myself included, I don't think there were particularly hype moments,
(41:49):
kind of what I was saying earlier about I wish
there was a little bit more adversity from the villain
and that struggle. I don't think there were a whole
lot of cheer moments in this movie, and I think
that makes it more of a reason to go watch
this in theaters, which that's kind of what I was
surprised by I wanted to have that big epic roar,
people clapping. There wasn't a whole lot of that. Maybe
(42:09):
it was just my theater's vibe. Maybe it was because
the dude next to me took his shoes off and
was barefoot next to me. Maybe that took a little
bit away from that. But that's why you go to
the movies. I still think it as an event. However,
I don't think the crowd was as electric as it
was for a movie like Spider Man No Way Home.
So if you weren't as excited about this movie is
(42:30):
maybe some of the other Marvel movies. You may wait
till it goes to Disney Plus. But if you do go,
do stay because there are two very important post credit scenes.
And finally, if I had to rate thor Love and Thunder,
I would give it four point five out of five
storm Breakers. I honestly thought this movie had the potential
(42:50):
to be my five out of five movie for the year.
Didn't quite get there. If it would have had a
bigger Harrah moment, probably could have made it to a
five out of five. But without a doubt, it is
crushing it at the box office right now made sixty
nine point nine million dollars and it's opening day alone
even more the night before that probably be the third
(43:11):
highest grossing movie of the year with a very good reason.
It's been a really great summer so far, or you know,
really only kicking off July, so I've been seeing so
many movies I can't even get them into all my
movie reviews. So that is it for this week's. Next week,
I'll finally get to my Elvis movie review, which I
haven't done yet, so have all that to look forward to.
(43:33):
What a summer blockbuster season, and that is going to
do it for another episode here on the podcast. I
feel like this episode has gone longer than expected with
the interview and I couldn't shut up about four Love
and Thunder. So I'm gonna punt the trailer park for
this week because a trailer drop that I'll probably spend
another ten minutes on. I'll just say that for next week.
(43:54):
But I can't skip the listeners shout out of the
week because I do it every single episode. So you
can tweet me at Mike d stro I love including
anytime somebody tweets a photo of you listening to the
podcast or in this case something movie related and I
gotta tweet. Recently after I did the Pixar Characters that
Deserve Solo films from Kyle Skew, and Kyle tweeted a
(44:18):
picture of him maybe a girlfriend or wife and they
were dressed up as the characters from UP, and Kyle wrote,
not want to jump on social media, but enjoy the podcast,
and I thought I would share a feeding photo from
the past weekend as we dressed up as the characters
from UP for a Disney themed party. Keep up the
great work hashtag movie Mix Movie podcast. First of all, Kyle,
(44:41):
I am envious that you have friends that to begin with,
I'm envious that you have friends, but also that you
have friends that throw Disney themed parties like that sounds
really fun to me. I would go to one of
those in a heartbeat. And your costumes look dope. The
only time I've ever dressed up as a Pixar character
was my very first Halloween. I was able to somehow
(45:04):
convince my parents to spend money on a woody costume,
and that's the only time in my life they've ever
spent money on a costume from Walmart, and sadly, I
outgrew that costume pretty quickly, so maybe someday I'll get
invited to one of these and reprise my role as Woody.
And second of all, really appreciate you listening to the
podcast and jumping on Twitter, which you say you normally
(45:27):
don't do, just to send me that. It's like going
an extra level there. So I appreciate that. Kyle. Hope
you had fun at the party and hope you keep
listening to the podcast. As to the rest of the
movie crew, I appreciate all the love and support, especially
when you comment on things that really helps me out.
And what I like to do is I like to
post videos for my interviews and create a secret emoji
(45:48):
that you can go and comment, because sometimes I know
it's just weird that you don't know what to say
to somebody even though you like the video and you
want to show your support, you can just drop a like.
But the secret emoji for this interview would I'll be
dropping a video of me talking to Chris Sanders, and
since Stitch is an alien, if you want to go
comment on the video on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok dropped the
(46:09):
alien emoji that is the secret emoji for this episode,
and I'll talk to you again next week here on
the podcast, and until then, go out and watch good movies.
Later
Host
Mike D
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