When the original animated Lilo & Stitchpremiered in 2002, it was preceded by one of the most memorable promotion campaigns of the 2000s. A series of trailers began highlighting the beloved (and then fairly recent) animated movies of the Disney Renaissance, and then brought Stitch in to interrupt and cause chaos. He got Jasmine to leave Aladdin’s red carpet, he splashes Ariel during the climax of “Part Of Your World” and he literally crashes Belle and the Beast’s big dance in the ballroom.
The history of these ads is the subject of a new and very interesting article in Vulture, which tracks the campaign from idea to execution. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the people who worked on those original movies were not immediately convinced that irreverently sending up their work was something they were comfortable with. “I remember they dropped off The Lion King. And of course, that film is sacred. They were really not happy about leaving this stuff with us,” director Chris Sanders recalled. “I said, ‘Well, I worked on Lion King. It’s safe with me. If there’s a coffee stain on this stuff, it might have originally been my coffee stain!'”
It wasn’t just the animators who took some convincing. Paige O’Hara, who voiced Belle in 1991’s Beauty And The Beast, sounds like she really did not understand the concept as it was explained to her. “She was in New York, so we recorded her remotely, and we were just on a speakerphone. That got strange because she sounds just like Belle,” says Sanders. Belle has two lines in the spot: “I’ll be in my room,” and then, to Stitch, “Get your own movie.” “Anyway, we pitched this thing and then there was silence,” Sanders remembers. “And she said, ‘So I’m mad at him?’ ‘Yes. Well, no, you’re just disappointed.’ So she did the recording and she said, ‘I’ll be in my room.’ And we were like, ‘I think you’re more disappointed than that.’ But she kept coming back with this really upbeat, happy delivery. And we kept saying, ‘No, you’re just more disappointed.’ Finally, we said, ‘Maybe try being a little mad.’ And then she hit it.” Sometimes, you do want to see Belle angry.
