If you went to watch the new live-action Lilo and Stitch movie during its opening weekend, you might have noticed one character missing. But Captain Gantu’s removal wasn’t for no reason.
Both little kids and sentimental millennials have been living their best lives at the cinema this weekend, with the new movie smashing original box office records. For the most part, Lilo and Stitch in real life is much like the cartoon version we met some 20 years ago… with one big difference.
A key character the first time around was villain Captain Gantu, the corrupt captain of the Galactic Federation and a longstanding rival of Experiment 626 (aka, Stitch). Across the movie, follow-up TV series, and Stitch! The Movie, we see Gantu slowly but surely adopt the mantra of Ohana, alongside Pleakley and Jumba.
However, if you’re hoping to see Gantu in the live-action remake, you’re going to be disappointed. He’s not featured in the story at all, but there’s a good reason why.
Captain Gantu’s removal makes way for new villain in Lilo and Stitch
According to Lilo and Stitch director Dean Fleischer Camp, cutting Captain Gantu meant Jumba could shine through as a bigger villain in the movie’s third act.
“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 told EW. “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.”
“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,” he added.
To make matters even more painful for OG fans, Gantu was in original drafts of the script before being cut out.
“We did have it in at one point,” producer Jonathan Eirich continued. “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?'”
Choosing Jumba to be the more prominent villain eventually became more of a link to the film’s overall themes of family and community.
“Jumba is a father figure,” Eirich clarified. “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.”
If you’re missing your Gantu fix, don’t worry – once you’ve seen the new version, all animated iterations of Lilo and Stitch are available to stream on Disney+.
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