How Disney Animation's new Stitch short made room for every pencil, pixel, paintbrush and person who wanted in.

Stitch is getting a new housemate. In Lilo & Scratch, Lilo brings home a mischievous, mysterious cat. Then she runs off to do some errands, and Stitch is left in charge of a creature who leaves a wake of destruction behind her. It's the first Stitch project from Walt Disney Animation Studios since the 2002 original, and you can only see it in theaters, right before Disney's HEXED, opening Wednesday, Nov. 25.

I talked with co-directors Fawn Veerasunthorn and Malcon Pierce and composers Haim Mazar and Grace Fisher. The best part of the story isn't the cat. It's who got to make it.

When word got around the studio, people lined up to help. The directors' goal was to let everyone work in the medium they love. "Whether it be using a pencil or a pixel or a paintbrush, everybody could join the fun," Pierce said at Disney's press presentation.

That meant inventing a pipeline where hand-drawn and CG animation live in the same frame. Producer Nathan Curtis says one shot has "a hand-drawn Stitch with a CG Scratch, and they're living seamlessly in the same world."

"Nobody had to sit this one out, which is really cool," Pierce told me. "We had some folks that were doing digital paintings at the beginning that got so inspired by the end, they were doing watercolor paintings on it."

Veerasunthorn remembers a CG animator who asked to switch: "I actually do hand-drawn animation, this would be my chance to join in on this. Is that okay? And we're like, yes, of course."

Some of the original film's artists came back too. Alex Kupershmidt, who supervised Stitch's animation in 2002, was character animation lead. About a quarter of the watercolor backgrounds were reused from the original, and painters including Tia Kratter and Larry Wu made more than a dozen new ones.

The short is built on physical comedy, and the directors kept pushing. "Even with working with story team, they were like, is this okay? Is this too far?" Veerasunthorn said. "And we were like, no, you can go further for that. It's a very liberating feeling."

There wasn't a traditional script. The team outlined ideas and talked through questions like "Do you love cat? Do you hate cat? What would Stitch do?" Pierce's favorite thing about Stitch: he "lets his intrusive thoughts win, which I wish I could be that free."

The music had to do a lot of the talking, since the short has very little dialogue. Mazar calls the opening "our blank canvas, if you will. Not that it's blank, it's filled with incredible imagery." He and Fisher wanted it to sound like "something familiar, yet new and exciting." That meant Hawaiian instrumentation with a full symphonic orchestra. Mazar's summary: "action adventure infused with Hawaiian music."

Fisher's path to the scoring stage is a story of its own. She trained on piano and cello, then at 17 developed a rare neurological disease that left her paralyzed from the neck down. She turned to composing, and she and Mazar traded ideas back and forth until her sketches grew into full orchestral mock-ups. She called the partnership "empowering" and "such an amazing opportunity to be a part of."

"It gives me so much hope that more can be done and achieved," Veerasunthorn said. That's the takeaway: a studio short where no one's medium, history or ability kept them out.

Get to your seat early on Nov. 25. Lilo & Scratch plays before HEXED, so if you're late, you'll miss it. Catch up on our HEXED story: read it here

Hit reply and tell me: are you Team Stitch or Team Scratch? I read every one.

Images courtesy of Disney.

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