Stitch Has Met His Match, and It’s a Cat: Disney Unveils New “Lilo & Scratch” Short at Annecy

Walt Disney Animation Studios couldn’t have picked a better day to take the stage at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival and announce a new Stitch Short. June 26th, 626 Day to Stitch fans the world over. Directors Fawn Veerasunthorn and Malcon Pierce surprised the room with the first-ever reveal of Lilo & Scratch, a brand-new theatrical short starring everyone’s favorite blue Experiment. It’s Disney Animation’s first theatrical short in five years, and it will play in front of the studio’s next feature, Hexed, this fall.

The premise is simple, and gloriously chaotic. Set shortly after the events of the 2002 original, the short finds Stitch finally, blissfully settled into his new found family, until Lilo brings home a new member of the ‘ohana: a cat named Scratch. As Veerasunthorn and Pierce put it, Scratch is so disruptive, so radiant, and so deeply intrusive that she turns Stitch’s whole world upside down. 

For Veerasunthorn and Pierce, Lilo & Scratch is a passion project. When word got out that they were pitching a Stitch short, the studio’s animation nerds came running, and so did some of the artists who made the 2002 film. Chief among them: Alex Kupershmidt, the original supervising animator of Stitch, who is animating on the short by hand, on paper, and who keeps reminding the team that this is a cartoon and to push it far. The filmmakers showed a photo of Kupershmidt at his desk working on an actual shot from the short.

Chris Sanders, who co-created, co-directed and voiced Stitch in the original film, returns to the recording booth as Stitch, and the filmmakers shared footage of him back behind the mic. Joining him as Lilo is Maia Kealoha, who played the character in last year’s live-action Lilo & Stitch, shown in a clip from her very first recording session.

The most jaw-dropping part of the presentation wasn’t the casting, it was the craft. Veerasunthorn and Pierce set out to make Lilo & Scratch look and feel exactly like the hand-drawn 2002 film, while building a pipeline flexible enough that any artist could contribute in whatever medium they chose: pencil, pixel, paintbrush or stylus, sometimes within the same frame.

To prove it could work, they showed their homework. First, a side-by-side: an original frame from the 2002 film next to the team’s recreation. In the new image, the watercolor background is hand-painted, but Stitch, Lilo and the record player are CG models — built by the studio’s modeling team to read as flat, hand-drawn characters, with no hint of cel-shading. A slow camera tilt revealed the trick, briefly showing the dimensionality of the “2D” characters before settling back into a perfect storybook flatness.

Then came an early animation test: Stitch and Scratch trading laser blasts outside. Stitch is hand-drawn; Scratch is CG — and they look identical. In one beat, Stitch jams his blaster into Scratch’s mouth, and the weapon morphs from hand-drawn to CG seamlessly.

The backgrounds got their own party trick. The team honored the iconic watercolor look of the original while letting artists paint traditionally or digitally. Veerasunthorn turned it into a game, showing the audience six backgrounds and challenging them to spot which two were painted on paper. The audience of animation experts couldn’t reliably tell. On top of that, the production pulled original background art from the 2002 film, freshly scanned at the Animation Research Library, to drop directly into the short. Rounding out the look were production designer Kevin Yang and VFX supervisor Jeremy Sikorski, who helped engineer the techniques that let pencil and pixel share a frame

Disney closed the segment by screening the opening two minutes of Lilo & Scratch, and it’s pure original-film comfort food. It opens on the familiar blue-castle logo before finding Stitch on the couch, watching a black-and-white silent comedy and feeding a sandwich to Pudge the fish, who’s left the ocean and taken up residence in a water-filled coffee-pot bowl.

Lilo arrives to introduce the family’s newest member. The moment her back is turned, Scratch lunges for Pudge; Stitch stops her, but ends up looking like the menace, and gets scolded for it. Lilo announces she’s off to fetch Scratch a celebration cheesecake, leaving Stitch in charge just as Scratch’s powers begin to manifest and Stitch realizes keeping this cat away from Pudge is going to be a problem. 

What follows, the filmmakers tease, is a wild, chaotic chase across the island that escalates into a laser-blasting battle between Stitch and Scratch through town. Total mayhem, and exactly the kind of comedy this character was built for.

Lilo & Scratch will play in theaters in front of Hexed, Walt Disney Animation Studios’ next feature, arriving this fall.