One of the many things that interests me about this movie is that which character I sympathize with most varies based on what mood I’m in. On the one hand, I have been the grown-up, and Nani (Tia Carrere) is trying really, really hard to do what’s right even though she’d really rather just give up and be a young woman. We never do learn how old she is, but she’s too young to be in the situation she’s in. On the other hand, I have definitely been the weird grieving kid.

Lilo (Daveigh Chase) and Nani Pelekai are sisters. Their parents have been killed in a car accident, and they don’t seem to have any family other than each other. Nani is now Lilo’s guardian, which is not easy—she is, after all, a young woman with no particular skills or experience trying to maintain a job that lets her care for a young sister with serious emotional needs. Their social worker, Cobra Bubbles (Ving Rhames), sympathizes, but he’s not sure it’s in Lilo’s best interests to stay with Nani even if the sisters love each other and are clinging to one another. In a desperate attempt to give Lilo something, Nani takes her to the pound and lets her pick out a dog.

What she gets is not a dog. While the sisters have been dealing with their problems, Mad Alien Scientist Dr. Jumba Jookiba (David Ogden Stiers) is on trial for creating life. Scary, evil life. Namely Experiment 626 (Christopher Michael Sanders). He was created for the express purpose of sowing chaos. Jumba is convicted, and 626 is to be imprisoned on a desert asteroid. He escapes. He crashes on Earth. At first, there is relief—his molecular density means he cannot float, and he’s heading right to the Pacific Ocean. However, he manages to hit land. Specifically, Hawaii. Specifically, not far from where Nani and Lilo live. He’s hit by a truck, then brought to the pound. Lilo brings him home.

The movie does not shy away from the fact that Lilo is a deeply scarred little girl. She was probably always weird; some kids just are. I was. She’s also clearly a quite intelligent little girl. She has also suffered a loss many of us cannot even begin to fathom. From my own experience, I’m sure that it’s that as much as anything that makes her isolated. It was easier to fit in when I was just intelligent and weird than it became after my father died. Parents of small children don’t die as often now as they used to, and I was the only kid I knew for years who had a dead parent, if you don’t count my sisters. There was almost a sense that it would be contagious; certainly my friends did not know how to deal with the information and with my own lingering grief issues.

However, the movie also gives both girls space to grieve. It’s clear that losing each other would just reopen the wounds that are only barely beginning to heal from the loss of their parents. Lilo lashes out at Nani because Nani is trying to be a parent now. Nani lashes out at Lilo because Lilo has become a burden on her. Both girls clearly desperately wish they could go back to a time when they were sisters being taken care of by parents. Who can blame them? And they appear to have no adults other than Bubbles—there are a few other adults who know them, but there is no one that Nani can rely on other who is in a position of support.

It is perhaps no wonder that I’ve always been drawn more to the story of the sisters than the story of the aliens. Yes, I’m amused by the running joke that the Earth has been declared a mosquito sanctuary, and I’ll always give Agent Pleakley (Kevin McDonald) some of my residual Kids in the Hall fondness. But I am much more interested in the human angle of the story and always have been. Possibly it would be different if I hadn’t been probably older than Nani when the movie came out.

I also like the space the movie gives to David (Jason Scott Lee). He likes Nani. He’s interested in her. He’d quite like to go out with her. I think he thinks it would be good for her to be able to go out with someone, for preference him but in general anyone who will let her just be herself for a while. But okay, if she feels overwhelmed by just what she’s dealing with right now, fine. He’ll be her friend, and not in a Put Kindness Tokens In Get Sex Out kind of way. Legitimately her friend, spending time with her and Lilo, letting her know when there’s a job that she might get. No, he’s not denying that he’s still interested, but Nani knows that, so why make a big deal out of it?

I have friends who grew up haole, white in Hawaii. With the implication that they were probably rich, even if for reasons they were in many ways bitterly poor. (But poor in that voluntary hippie sense; one of those friends, for example, has rich grandparents.) They also like this movie, in part because of its portrayal of Hawaiian culture. It isn’t even just that the Hawaiian characters in the movie are drawn to look like real Polynesian people. It’s subtler things, like the sign on Lilo’s door that says “kapu,” which is the traditional Hawaiian equivalent of “taboo.” It’s a Hawaiian native’s “keep out” sign.

Perhaps the best thing about this movie is its undercurrent of warmth. Lilo is a girl overflowing with love. Think, for example, of the affection obvious in the exchange where Nani insists that gravity is increasing; Lilo’s response suggests that they’ve done this before. Indeed, Nani’s choice to get Lilo a dog—which is, if you think about it, another mouth to feed and probably even more responsibility for Nani—is in part getting her an outlet for that love, and one that doesn’t make the same kind of demands on Lilo that Nani now has to. Lilo even has an unmatched love for the tourists, finding even fat, sunburned old men beautiful. No wonder that she is able to find good in Stitch, as she names 626; she can find good in everyone.