There Is No Captain Gantu in the Live-Action Lilo & Stitch

I’m sorry to be the one to break this news to the people of DeviantArt, but Captain Gantu — the hulking, whale-shark-like alien voiced by Kevin Michael Richardson who serves at the command of the United Galactic Federations Grand Councilwoman in the animated original Lilo & Stitch — is not in the live-action adaptation of the movie at all. To reiterate: There is no Captain Gantu. No cameo appearance, no mention — nothing.

The loss of Captain Gantu isn’t just a bummer for fans so much as it recalibrates the whole moral thrust of Lilo & Stitch. Gantu and social worker Cobra Bubbles (played in the new film by Courtney B. Vance) pose a threat to Lilo’s family for different reasons — the former needs to haul Experiment 626 back to space jail no matter the cost, and the latter is keen to separate Lilo from Nani, her overwhelmed older sister and guardian — but both Gantu and Cobra are acting under orders from their jobs, not genuine malice. To that end, Gantu is the original film’s greatest threat: hunting Stitch, capturing Lilo, and weaponizing violence against the people of Hawaii in order to fulfill his mission. Gantu holds himself in high esteem only to be foiled every single time by a little critter 20 times smaller than he is. He’s useless: a completely impotent cog in a government machine. After a climactic chase through the mountains of Kaua’i, however, the Grand Councilwoman tells Gantu to stand down: Lilo and her family are now under the protection of the Galactic Federation due to their ownership of Stitch. Gantu is forced into retirement.

Part of why Chris Sanders’s original film works so well is that there is no real villain. Whereas a number of the fantastical animated Disney films required a big bad hoping to kill or overthrow a kingdom, Lilo & Stitch — despite its heightened, alien-dense world — was more or less tethered to reality. It understood that people (and aliens) have jobs and responsibilities, as unpleasant as they may be. Even Gantu, the film’s scariest presence, is mostly there for comic relief — he has been roped into this plot against his will and only sticks with it because of a bruised ego. Is he willing to kill humans to get Stitch? Oh, sure — that’s not ideal, of course, but Gantu rarely proves himself capable of much of anything, let alone violence. In lieu of Gantu’s pursuit, the live-action Lilo & Stitch instead makes Dr. Jumba (Zach Galifianakis) the villain of the film. What he’s after, exactly, is a bit of a mystery. He alludes to wanting to genetically modify Stitch and remove his capacity to love so that they can, um, unleash hell on the galaxy, but why that’s a motivating factor remains to be seen. Whereas both Jumba and Pleakley move in with Lilo and her family at the end of the original, Jumba does not get invited to join the ohana at the end of the live-action Lilo & Stitch.

While no one at Disney has addressed the absence of Gantu, fans have speculated there might have been budget constraints, especially when it came to animating and designing a big guy. The other aliens — Jumba, Pleakley, and the Grand Councilwoman — are not seen in their alien form very often; Jumba and Pleakley adopt “human forms” when they go around Hawaii. If Gantu was cut so the live-action Stitch’s fur could seem all the more realistic, perhaps that’s a worthier allocation of budget, especially when it comes to a character as big and difficult to render in “live-action” as Gantu. Removing him could theoretically make room for the film to build out Jumba’s diabolical intentions, but the movie seems to have no clue what to do with him, either.

If nothing else, Lilo & Stitch now lacks a flustered beefcake. For many, Gantu was something of a sexual awakening, if not a himbo icon. Getting cut from a movie is something that would happen to Gantu — his presence will be missed. If you find yourself missing him, there’s always Tumblr.

Related

• Maybe a Live-Action Lilo & Stitch Remake Wasn’t Such a Great Idea
• An Oral History of Lilo & Stitch
• The Stories Behind the Original Lilo & Stitch’s Disney-Spoofing Ads