Why Captain Gantu isn’t in the live-action ‘Lilo & Stitch’ movie

This article contains plot details for Lilo & Stitch.

Experiment 626’s arch-nemesis is no longer a threat.

In Disney’s new live-action Lilo & Stitch movie, the chief antagonist from the original 2002 animated film, Captain Gantu, is nowhere to be found. Instead the climax has been revised to make Jumba (played by Zach Galifianakis) the villain, as he seeks to recapture his experiment as part of his own plot for galactic domination.

It is Jumba who kidnaps both Lilo (Maia Kealoha) and Stitch (voiced by Chris Sanders), as opposed to Captain Gantu, and who Stitch must escape from before helping to rescue Lilo. It’s a big change from the original movie, but director Dean Fleischer Camp explains that it was necessary to maintain the more realistic parameters of live action.

“Something that live-action films do by virtue of taking place in reality is that they are already more grounded,” Fleischer Camp tells Entertainment Weekly. “If you have a story like Lilo & Stitch that does actually have this pretty terrestrial drama between the sisters and staying together, you can actually do them a greater service in a live-action movie. You can make those relationships deeper, hopefully more emotionally resonant.”

There’s also the fact that live action can heighten or change the stakes of storytelling, which was a factor here. “You end up thinking about how it is a very different experience to see an actual 6-year-old girl potentially being threatened with being torn from her caregiver sister after grieving the loss of their parents,” Fleischer Camp says. “That is a very different kind of responsibility from a filmmaking perspective than what you can get away with in an animated film.”

That realization also led the filmmaking team to divide the character of Cobra Bubbles, Lilo’s social worker in the animated film, into a CIA agent of the same name (Courtney B. Vance) and the new role of Mrs. Kekoa (Tia Carrere). “If the dramatic stakes of Lilo is that she’s going to get separated from her sister, then you need a person who actually services those stakes in a credible way,” Fleischer Camp says. “You can get away with that being Cobra Bubbles in an animated film — a 6-foot-5 huge dude with ‘Cobra’ tattooed on his knuckles is somehow a social worker in that world.”

But, he says, “I don’t think you get away with it the same way in a live-action film. That was guiding a lot of our decision making — how to land the plane in terms of the emotional realities that were going on in the film.”

That ultimately led to Gantu’s omission from the new film. “One of the things I loved about the original is that up until Gantu arrives, there is no villain that is just a villain,” Fleischer Camp continues. “Gantu arrives and it turns into a more conventional movie. I thought there was a nice opportunity here for [Jumba] to turn and become the villain in the third act.”

He adds, “To create real estate for all that emotional stuff and the deepening that we did, you have to get rid of stuff. And so Gantu was a casualty of that, but one that I felt pretty confident about from a storytelling perspective.”

Producer Jonathan Eirich reveals that original versions of the script did include Captain Gantu, and that it was Fleischer Camp who advocated for the shift. “We did have it in at one point,” Eirich tells EW. “In part because you’re following certain aspects of the original movie and you’re like, ‘Oh, well of course Gantu has to be in this. It was really to Dean’s credit that he challenged the idea of, ‘Well, does he have to? Could it be somebody else who has a more personal connection?'”

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That made Jumba the natural choice, particularly because it would allow the film to further amplify its themes of family and community. “Jumba is a father figure,” Eirich notes. “A terrible delinquent father figure, but father figure nonetheless to Stitch. So, it did feel like, ‘Oh, maybe that could actually give even more resonance to the third act.’ We started down the path with no Gantu, just seeing where it was going to lead. If it didn’t lead anywhere, we would’ve probably come back and put it back in the movie, but it did feel really fertile from a story perspective.”

Adds Fleischer Camp, “You want your main antagonist to also be the representative of the theme of the film. It seemed like an opportunity to do that as opposed to just there’s a big bad boss that comes down and is shooting lasers at everyone.”

“We know Lilo would sacrifice herself for Stitch, and we know Stitch would sacrifice for himself for Lilo,” says Eirich. “But the notion of this thing that came into your world and destroyed it, that you would actually do something heroic to save Stitch instead of just Lilo was a really impactful moment and a beautiful new moment.”

And that is the spirit of ohana.

With reporting by Nicholas Romano.