Lilo & Stitch director responds to criticism over character not wearing dress in live-action remake

Dean Fleischer Camp, the director of the new live-action Lilo & Stitch remake, has addressed fan complaints over the movie’s reinvention of beloved character Agent Pleakley.

The one-eyed alien was a major character in the original Disney animated franchise. A self-proclaimed “Earth expert,” Pleakley partnered with Jumba Jookiba on a mission to capture Experiment 626/Stitch. In the 2002 film, he went undercover wearing a dress and wig to try and fit in with humans.

Following the release of the Lilo & Stitch trailer in March, fans noticed Fleischer Camp’s version of Pleakley did not wear a dress. Instead, he wore a plain, blue long-sleeve shirt.

The Marcel the Shell with Shoes On director and co-creator has since responded to the criticism, insisting that he “tried” to keep his version of Pleakley (played by Billy Magnussen) in a dress.

“I have had people message me, ‘Why is Pleakley not wearing a dress?’” he said in a recent TikTok video, alongside a screenshot of one comment that read: “How dare they ruin Pleakley’s disguise like that.”

“And I just want to say, I tried… I tried,” the director said, sharing images of his original concept drawings showing Pleakley in a dress and wig.

He further touched on the changes in a new interview with Entertainment Weekly, confirming that his team did “some tests and some character design work” to see if they could realistically render a CGI alien in human clothes. But the result felt “a bridge too far,” he admitted.

“The humor of them walking around Hawaii dressed in these terrible disguises where Pleakley still has one eyeball, it’s a little harder to buy in live action,” Fleischer Camp said.

The forthcoming live-action Lilo & Stitch, out in theaters May 23, stars young newcomer Maia Kealoha as Lilo, Sydney Agudong as her older sister Nani, Zach Galifianakis as Jumba Jookiba, Tia Carrere as Mrs. Kekoa, and original Lilo & Stitch creator Chris Sanders as Stitch. Sanders originated the voice of Stitch in the 2002 movie and has reprised the role in many sequels and spinoffs.

“One of the very first creative discussions we had was [that] we have to get Chris Sanders back,” Fleischer Camp explained on TikTok. “He was really, really generous. He would come in and do [Automated Dialogue Replacement] for hours and hours.”

The 2002 original Lilo & Stitch movie follows the story of a lonely six-year-old girl, Lilo, who adopts what she thinks is a dog but actually turns out to be an extraterrestrial entity that has escaped prison.

In the trailer for the Lilo & Stitch live-action film, which dropped in March, the script almost exactly follows that of the cartoon.

The real trick to adapting the classic cartoon into a live-action remake, Flesicher Camp told Entertainment Weekly, “is to try to make a movie that rhymes really well with what people remember of the original without just doing a one-to-one exact mirror.”

“We had to figure out ways to soften the things that didn’t work in live action,” he shared, “but also find new things that we could do that the animated movie couldn’t.”