Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.

I can’t believe how many stories I’ve put together tonight. I can’t believe the sun is up now. I can’t believe I have a meeting in a few hours. Here’s MON-EL, hopefully making more sense than me at this point, to tell you what he thought of Disney’s newest release, LILO & STITCH:

Harry:

Just wanted to let you know that I caught a showing of Disney's latest animation feature, Lilo & Stitch at a preview in Houston.

As a Disney Club member, I had received an email a few weeks ago indicating that there would be sneak previews throughout the country - I replied to the email and a few days later, received an official invitation.

The wife and I are DisneyWorld fanatics, so we thought it was about time to take our almost 2-year old daughter to her first movie - we might as well make it a Disney movie. I vaguely remember my first moviegoing experience - it was Pinocchio. So we were hoping Lilo & Stitch would be a good start for her. Mind you, our kid is addicted to the DVD's of Toy Story (1 & 2) and Shrek, so she has pretty good taste in flicks already.

The pass we had was good for up to 4 people, so we also took our next door neighbor's boy who is 5. The neighbor babysat our 4 month old son while we took her son. Not a bad trade.

Anyway... The Cinemark theatre was already 80% full when we arrived about 10 minutes before show time. We managed to find some seats way down front. Not my favorite place, but hey, it was free. The theatre was a filled predominately with people like us - parents with little kids. The best seats were sectioned off for the "press".

I suppose my expectations were set pretty high for this movie - I had read lot's of hype such as this was the best Disney 'toon since The Lion King, etc. That may be true (except for the Pixar/Disney films).

I'm not going to go into any detail on the story - it's pretty easy to figure that out from the previews. I did enjoy the movie, but it wasn't great. It had a lot of humorous and quirky moments, but only once or twice did I find myself laughing out loud. That goes for the rest of the audience, as well. All the kids in the theatre were surprisingly well-behaved. But there weren't any squeals of joy, or cheers or laughing that I could hear.

The animation was nothing groundbreaking, but it was very well done. It was a mix of traditional illustration and some computer animation (particularly the space ships). I did like the backgrounds of Hawaii - they tended to be watercolor paintings.

There were also a couple of interesting scenes for an animated Disney movie - Stitch is looking a television, and they are showing actual black and white footage on the TV screen. That was kind of cool. And in another scene, Lilo is teaching Stitch how to act like Elvis, and she shows an actual photo of Elvis. The use of "real" images in an animation is nothing new, but I don't ever recall seeing it used by Disney before. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

Everyone seems to be talking about Stitch, but my favorite character has to be Lilo. She's as cute as can be and is voiced perfectly by Daveigh Chase. The opening scene where she explains to her dance teacher that she's late because it was Thursday and she had to feed a certain fish a peanut butter sandwich because "he controls the weather" was really funny. It gives you the first glimpse into this somewhat emotionally troubled child with a very active imagination and and off-beat look at life.

The question is... Will this be a big hit? Yeah, big but not huge. Our neighbor boy really liked it ("better than Spirit!").

Anyway... I applaud Disney from trying something different than their typical musical. I hope it does well and makes them lots of money.

You can call me Mon-El