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Here is a fact that surprises almost everyone who hears it for the first time, and that becomes more fascinating the more you think about it: in Japan, Stitch — the blue alien experiment from a 2002 Hawaiian-set Disney animated film — consistently outsells, out-merchandises, and out-trends Mickey Mouse, the single most recognizable and most commercially valuable cartoon character in the history of entertainment. Not occasionally. Not in specific product categories. Broadly, consistently, and by margins that have been documented by Disney's own commercial operations and by the Japanese retail industry for over two decades. Walk through Tokyo DisneySea or Tokyo...

Let's talk about something that Disney has historically been very uncomfortable with: genuine, unresolved, justified anger. Not villain anger, which is always clearly coded as wrong and defeated by the end of the film. Not hero anger that is quickly overcome through a lesson about love or friendship. But the specific kind of anger that comes from being hurt by a world that was not built for you, from having needs that nobody around you is equipped to meet, from being simultaneously too much and not enough — the kind of anger that does not have a clean resolution and that...

There is a moment in "Lilo and Stitch" that stops many adult viewers in a way it did not stop them when they first saw it as children. It is not the action sequence. It is not the comedy. It is the moment when Lilo — a lonely, grieving, genuinely difficult child who has been rejected by her peers and who is struggling under the weight of a loss she does not have the emotional language to process — finds a creature at the animal shelter that is ugly, broken, dangerous, and completely unwanted. And she chooses him. Not despite these...

Here is a question that sounds simple until you actually try to answer it: which is the better redemption arc — Stitch or Buzz Lightyear? On the surface, it seems like the kind of debate that has an obvious answer. Buzz Lightyear is one of the most celebrated characters in the history of animation, the co-protagonist of a franchise that has produced four films across nearly thirty years and that is widely considered the gold standard of animated storytelling. Stitch is the protagonist of a single film — a beloved, emotionally powerful film, but a single film — whose redemption happens...

There is a moment in "Lilo & Stitch" that stops you cold every single time you watch it, no matter how many times you have seen the film. Stitch — Experiment 626, the creature designed by a mad scientist to be the perfect engine of destruction, the alien who was built to have no capacity for love or connection or belonging — is sitting alone on a hillside at night, holding a copy of "The Ugly Duckling," and he reads the ending and he understands it. He understands it not as a story about a duck who turns beautiful but...