“It’s been so much fun having him out in the world,” Morrison says. “He’s a little naughty, but he’s also so sweet. People have fallen in love with the character.”
Bowl-ed over
Stitch made his first appearance at last year’s D23, Disney’s annual fan event. A custom-created trailer teased his arrival for the assembled audience, and you can hear their cheers in real time when Stitch tears through the screen and into their lives.
That playful introduction purposefully echoed the way his predecessor made his debut over two decades ago. The trailers for the animated Lilo & Stitch memorably placed the alien in such Disney classics as Aladdin and The Lion King.
Needless to say, he didn’t play nicely with his fellow cartoons.
“We knew there was a lot of admiration and nostalgia for how Stitch interacted with other Disney properties in 2002,” Morrison notes. “That was something that became a factor for us: How do we take this character and have him intervene in a fun way that also encapsulates his personality?”
Instead of simply recreating that earlier Disney movie mayhem, though, Morrison’s team decided to find ways that Stitch could show up in the real world: “There were these cultural moments happening within our campaign window, and we decided that Stitch should be there.”
When it comes to cultural moments, it’s hard to get bigger than the Big Game. So it only made sense that Stitch would insert himself into the on-field action during the Super Bowl—an idea that Morrison credits to creative marketing evp Jackson George.
“Obviously, it was a complicated negotiation,” she says of how the Stitch cameo came to pass. “But the NFL was game, and we made sure to pick a moment where it felt seamless—like you were still watching the game. Only then do you realize that Stitch is there!”
According to Morrison, the Super Bowl stunt required a custom shoot on a football field, and then the visual effects department worked their digital magic on the footage. The result was a piece of in-game promotion that stood apart from the other movie trailers airing that night.
“It can be hard to cut through if you aren’t a big superhero movie,” Morrison notes. “Our spot got attention by feeling like it was almost built into the programming.”
The next wave
Coming off the Super Bowl, Morrison says her team fielded a number of calls from interested parties looking to recapture some of Stitch’s chaos magic. But they had already planned for the campaign’s next beat to be more story-focused and emphasize the film’s human stars—specifically Maia Kealoha as Lilo and Sydney Agudong as her older sister, Nani. Those characters were prominently featured in the first full trailer, which debuted with the release of Snow White in March.
