The second straight-to-video sequel to 2002’s outside-the-box animated Disney hit Lilo & Stitch, Leroy & Stitch
continues the series’ slide into colorful redundancy, offering forth a
healthy smattering of enjoyable character moments, but little of
originality or essentiality beyond that.

As a reward for
rounding up all 625 “experiments,” Lilo, Stitch, Jumba and Pleakley
have been placed around the galaxy in spots where each of them thinks
they truly belong. Chubby Jumba (voiced by David Ogden Stiers) is back
in the laboratory, the excitable Pleakley (voiced by Kevin McDonald) is
teaching college, Lilo is in Hawaii and Stitch (voiced by Chris
Sanders) is commanding a big red battleship. Their lives are all
collectively shook up, however, when the dastardly Dr. Hämsterviel
breaks out of prison and forces Jumba to create a new experiment —
Leroy (also voiced by Sanders), an evil twin of Stitch. Wait — wasn’t
Stitch himself originally an irascible pain in the rump? So that would
make this film a Xeroxed tale of alien versus self, right? Ah, but we
digress…

To make matters even worse, Dr. Hämsterviel soon clones nasty little
Leroy in an effort to form his own standing army. After that, it’s up
to Lilo (this time voiced not by Dakota Fanning, but by Daveigh Chase,
the freaky little girl from The Ring) to gather Stitch and the
rest of the gang from the far-flung corners of outer space to battle
this legion of Leroys. With the chips down and pressure mounting, these
friends discover that the one place they all truly belong is together.

Appreciative parents and young fans who have enjoyed the
Saturday-morning cartoon serial spawned by the original film will still
get a kick out of this flick, but those who were drawn in equal measure
to the original’s hearty emotional investment will find this chiefly an
exercise in elongated character outtakes. The introduction of Leroy
completes the Terminator-esque odyssey of the character of Stitch —
from “bad guy” to less bad guy to full-fledged hero — but Leroy & Stitch doesn’t have quite the scope to make that arc completely stirring.

The film is presented in what is billed as “family-friendly” 1.78:1
widescreen enhanced for 16×9 televisions, with a Dolby digital 5.1
surround-sound audio track and a bonus, never-previously-broadcast
episode of the aforementioned Lilo & Stitch cartoon series. Straight-to-video animation often gets knocked, and while the matte backgrounds here won’t win Leroy & Stitch
any awards for genre trailblazing, its colors are bright and vivid.
Owing to its streamlined production, the only other supplemental extra
comes in the form of a flight simulator game for kids. Like other
titles of this ilk, however, Leroy & Stitch is also
enhanced/enabled with Disney’s “FastPlay” technology, which means it
operates upon start-up, without the necessary use of a remote — all the
better if your kids have sticky hands. And really, what kids don’t have sticky hands? C (Movie) C (Disc)