Lilo & Stitch: Why Captain Gantu Was Cut Explained by Director

Lilo & Stitch director Dean Fleischer Camp explained in a new interview why Captain Gantu, a popular character from the original 2002 animated film, didn’t appear in the 2025 live-action remake. Voiced by Kevin Michael Richardson, Gantu serves as an antagonist in the earlier movie. However, it appears that he has been completely omitted from the plot of the recent feature

Lilo & Stitch cut Captain Gantu to give Jumba the spotlight as villain

Dean Fleischer Camp confirmed in an interview with Entertainment Weekly that Captain Gantu didn’t appear in the live-action Lilo & Stitch, so that Dr. Jumba Jookiba, portrayed by Zach Galifianakis, could take the center stage as the primary antagonist in the movie.

Per the filmmaker, leaving Gantu out also made the movie “more grounded.” He noted that he had to leave out certain things in the live-action movie even though they were part of the animated version, because he didn’t think “you get away with it the same way in a live-action film.” He added, “That was guiding a lot of our decision making — how to land the plane in terms of the emotional realities that were going on in the film.”

Fleischer Camp stated he loved the animated version until Gantu’s arrival because it didn’t yet have a villain. According to him, Gantu’s introduction made the 2002 production a “more conventional movie.” He elaborated, “I thought there was a nice opportunity here for [Jumba] to turn and become the villain in the third act.”

The Marcel the Shell with Shoes On director underscored that they needed space in the narrative to explore the emotional aspects of the story, and Gantu’s absence gave them just that.

“To create real estate for all that emotional stuff and the deepening that we did, you have to get rid of stuff,” he shared. “And so Gantu was a casualty of that, but one that I felt pretty confident about from a storytelling perspective.”

Producer Jonathan Eirich told the same outlet that even though Gantu was in the earlier versions of the script, Fleischer Camp was the one who suggested that they should leave him out. The director stated that Jumba was ultimately chosen as the main villain because he represented the movie’s themes.

Source: Comingsoon.net