DVDizzy Forum

Directors Veerasunthorn and Malcon Pierce also announced the all-new animated short Lilo & Scratch, which debuts in theaters this November with Disney’s Hexed. This is the first project starring Stitch from Disney Animation since the 2002 original animated feature Lilo & Stitch. The directors gave a sneak peek at the new short, which features the voices of Chris Sanders, reprising his role as Stitch, and Maia Kealoha, reprising her role as Lilo from the 2025 live-action version of the film. In the short, Stitch may have finally met his match in Scratch, a mischievous and mysterious cat who Lilo introduces as the newest member of their ‘ohana. While Lilo runs off to do some errands, Stitch is left in charge of this chaotic creature who leaves a wake of destruction in its path. The short is authentic to the look and style of the beloved 2002 feature and combines techniques from both hand-drawn and CG animation, along with rich watercolor backgrounds, in an innovative new way.

Fawn Veerasunthorn wrote:A fun directing collab with Malcon Pierce, produced by Nathan Curtis, and production designed by Kevin Yang. All around a dream come true to get to work on a project that led us to meeting Chris Sanders whom I’ve admired my entire career. Chris reprises his iconic role of Stitch and I can’t wait for you guys to experience this wild ride!

Malcon Pierce wrote:It was so much fun working with Fawn Veerasunthorn on this bucket list project! Thank you to our amazing producer Nathan Curtis for your enthusiasm and support throughout the film. A huge shoutout to our production designer Kevin Yang and VFX supervisor Jeremy Sikorski for the incredible visuals, your excitement for what this project could be artistically, and for helping us bring the world of Lilo & Stitch to life in a whole new way.

Q: Is it 2D animation or - that other style?

Fawn Veerasunthorn: It’s both 2D and CG. Our VFX team figured out how people from different disciplines can work on the same shot together. I learned a lot working with Alex K on this short!

Veerasunthorn and Pierce set out to make Lilo & Scratch look and feel exactly like the hand-drawn 2002 film, while building a pipeline flexible enough that any artist could contribute in whatever medium they chose: pencil, pixel, paintbrush or stylus, sometimes within the same frame. To prove it could work, they showed their homework. First, a side-by-side: an original frame from the 2002 film next to the team’s recreation. In the new image, the watercolor background is hand-painted, but Stitch, Lilo and the record player are CG models — built by the studio’s modeling team to read as flat, hand-drawn characters, with no hint of cel-shading. A slow camera tilt revealed the trick, briefly showing the dimensionality of the “2D” characters before settling back into a perfect storybook flatness. Then came an early animation test: Stitch and Scratch trading laser blasts outside. Stitch is hand-drawn; Scratch is CG — and they look identical. In one beat, Stitch jams his blaster into Scratch’s mouth, and the weapon morphs from hand-drawn to CG seamlessly.

The backgrounds got their own party trick. The team honored the iconic watercolor look of the original while letting artists paint traditionally or digitally. Veerasunthorn turned it into a game, showing the audience six backgrounds and challenging them to spot which two were painted on paper. The audience of animation experts couldn’t reliably tell. On top of that, the production pulled original background art from the 2002 film, freshly scanned at the Animation Research Library, to drop directly into the short. Rounding out the look were production designer Kevin Yang and VFX supervisor Jeremy Sikorski, who helped engineer the techniques that let pencil and pixel share a frame

Disney closed the segment by screening the opening two minutes of Lilo & Scratch, and it’s pure original-film comfort food. It opens on the familiar blue-castle logo before finding Stitch on the couch, watching a black-and-white silent comedy and feeding a sandwich to Pudge the fish, who’s left the ocean and taken up residence in a water-filled coffee-pot bowl. Lilo arrives to introduce the family’s newest member. The moment her back is turned, Scratch lunges for Pudge; Stitch stops her, but ends up looking like the menace, and gets scolded for it. Lilo announces she’s off to fetch Scratch a celebration cheesecake, leaving Stitch in charge just as Scratch’s powers begin to manifest and Stitch realizes keeping this cat away from Pudge is going to be a problem. What follows, the filmmakers tease, is a wild, chaotic chase across the island that escalates into a laser-blasting battle between Stitch and Scratch through town. Total mayhem, and exactly the kind of comedy this character was built for.