'Casper' to 'Lilo & Stitch': What We Lost in 30 Years of Live-Action Remakes

2025’s Lilo & Stitch is firmly part of that lucrative but widely derided live-action remakes of Disney cartoons trend. However, the idea of relaunching animated properties as live-action blockbusters didn’t start with Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland in 2010. Back when Hollywood was turning every possible TV show (Dragnet, The Brady Bunch, The Beverly Hillbillies) into a theatrical film, animated properties like The Flintstones and Inspector Gadget also got lavish live-action blockbuster adaptations. One such title was Casper, a Bill Paxton/Christina Ricci feature that debuted 30 years ago over the same Memorial Day weekend frame Lilo & Stitch is launching in.

Time is truly a flat circle. 30 years of cinematic evolution and live-action remakes of kids’ cartoons are still dominating movie theaters. However, those three decades between Casper and Lilo & Stitch also signify a drastic shift between how these kinds of titles operate.

The cavernous gulf between the age of Casper and the era of live-action Disney remakes can be seen just in the marketing of these two titles. Casper kicked off its marketing campaign with a wry teaser trailer that starts with a recreation of a classic Casper the Friendly Ghost cartoon. As the short goes on (and poor Casper finds that any potential friend is terrified of him), the camera pulls back to reveal the segment playing on a live-action TV. Casper’s three wicked uncles, Stretch, Fatso, and Stinkie, are just off-screen tossing candy, popcorn, and assorted jeers at the screen. Eventually, the ghostly trio presses a button on a remote, declaring that Casper must “come to the big screen!”, and then a montage from the final Casper film transpires.

While clearly trying to evoke nostalgia, this teaser also dabbles in postmodern-90s irony. After all, much of its runtime consists of mocking Casper’s saccharine antics. There’s a reason the teaser emphasizes the character’s three jaded uncles, right down to giving them the final “gag” in the trailer. Today, any live-action Casper movie would have a radically different marketing approach. Can’t you see it already? Behind-the-scenes featurettes of folks walking around a blue-screen set in slow-motion while a reverent piano cover of the Casper theme song plays in the background.

In interview segments, esteemed actors would talk in breathless excitement about how “Stretch was my entire childhood” and “this one’s for the fans, all you Casper fans out there.” This is the kind of sacrosanct treatment permeating the marketing for modern live-action remakes of How to Train Your Dragon, The Little Mermaid, and, of course, Lilo & Stitch. Goodness knows that altering the source material for these projects results in a frenzy of irate fans. Titles like Snow White and Mulan that dare change elements of the original animated feature endure withering controversy. All anyone can ask is where their beloved characters went in jumping from one medium to the next.

1995’s Casper, meanwhile, focuses heavily on newly created characters Kathleen “Kat” Harvey (Ricci) and Dr. James Harvey (Pullman). Conjuring up new protagonists is an inevitable byproduct of adapting a property previously confined to short weekly comics and TV episodes. The live-action Disney remakes, meanwhile, are rehashing 80-90 minute movies, which offer up enough material to ensure you don’t need to create new leads whole cloth.

Even considering these source material differences, Casper’s nonchalant embrace of newly crafted protagonists truly seems like it’s from another planet compared to today’s live-action remakes. Can you imagine if How to Train Your Dragon decided to plop in Addison Rae and Kit Connor as new lead characters to rub shoulders with Hiccup and Astrid? Dragon fans and scalies alike would pull a January 6 at DreamWorks Animation headquarters.

Casper’s approach to lead characters is different from a typical Disney Animation remake, no question there. However, the two projects are weirdly similar in their meta tendencies, albeit in different ways. Modern live-action Disney remakes (or realistically animated movies simulating reality) are chock-full of wry pop culture references and nods. The Lion King had Timon & Pumbaa singing “Be Our Guest,” for instance, instead of the original film’s luau song. Mufasa: The Lion King had Timon referencing an in-universe equivalent to the Lion King Broadway musical while Snow White had an irritating new song called “Princess Problems” full of post-modern references to classical princess stereotypes.

Casper, meanwhile, is full of larger cultural references rather than just nods to deeper Casper lore or even other Universal Pictures movies. Clint Eastwood, Mel Gibson, Rodney Dangerfield, and even Dan Aykroyd as Ray Stantz all make brief cameos in nods to their wider pop culture notoriety. Vintage Disney animated films or even initial Casper projects had a classical storytelling approach, largely eschewing references that could instantly date the material. Live-action remakes of animated properties, whether it’s 1995 or 2025, are already in conversation with older art from the start of their existence. This seems to give directors, writers, and studio executives more confidence to slather these scripts in winky references to broader pop culture.

A frustrating element binding these two Memorial Day tentpoles across time, though, is an emphasis on “reality.” Both the creative impulses of 1995’s Casper and the limitations of mid-90s CGI (which didn’t have anywhere near the limitless possibilities of hand-drawn animation) meant that Casper and his uncles weren’t quite as zany or heightened in their hijinks as they were in past Casper media. Lilo & Stitch, meanwhile, gives pre-existing characters like Jumba and Pleakley disturbing makeovers in the name of realistic CGI.

Their core designs look similar to their hand-drawn animated counterparts, but now these characters are rife with excessively detailed textures and other shortcomings rooted in ordinary reality. Heck, Jumba and Pleakley now largely navigate Earth disguised as humans rather than animated extra-terrestrials. Casper and Lilo & Stitch both exemplify feature film adaptations that remove the zany concepts and characters of their source material.

Hollywood’s love for exploiting old culture for a quick buck hasn’t wavered in 30 years. On the contrary, Lilo & Stitch in 2025 signals how this passion has only grown more fervent since Casper in 1995. Even that Paxton/Ricci feature made up new lead characters and wasn’t technically adapting a previous Casper movie. Lilo & Stitch, meanwhile, is often just a limper shot-for-shot remake of its predecessor. The cynical capitalist starting point remains the same, but now these live-action remakes of animated characters have become even more slavishly devoted to the past … so long as things don’t get TOO silly on-screen. Who knew, back in Memorial Day weekend 1995, that audiences were witnessing a glimpse into the troubling future of cinema?