Creator / Chris Sanders

TOOKIE BAH WAH BAH!^note LET'S GET STARTED! (also YAHOO! or COWABUNGA!)

Christopher Michael Sanders (born March 12, 1962) is an American film director, writer, animator, illustrator, and voice actor from Colorado Springs, Colorado. He's noted for his distinctive art style and managing to earn massive success with two of the biggest animation companies today: Disney and DreamWorks Animation. He worked extensively with the former during The Renaissance Age of Animation, and achieved success with directing partner Dean DeBlois on his brainchild, Lilo & Stitch, and has also been the voice of every appearance of Stitch (except in East Asia). In 2006, however, he left the company after being removed as the director of American Dog (which would later become Bolt) and went to work with Disney's greatest rival—DreamWorks—teaming up once again with DeBlois to work on How to Train Your Dragon, his biggest financial and critical success to date. After writing and directing The Croods with Kirk DeMicco and later having its sequel's production canceled (only to be later revived without either man as director), Sanders worked on his first solo and live-action/CGI-animated project, an adaptation of The Call of the Wild, which was produced by 20th Century Studios^note the first film under that banner after Disney dropped "Fox" from "20th Century Fox" and 3 Arts Entertainment. Due to Disney's acquisition of 21st Century Fox on March 20, 2019, this film also marked Sanders's return to Disney (outside of voice acting as Stitch) after having left the company 13 years prior. However, his return was strictly out of circumstance; his next project is an animated film adaptation of The Wild Robot for DreamWorks.

You can visit his blog here, his respective former and current Twitter accounts here and here, DeviantArt account here, Facebook account here, his YouTube channel here, and his TikTok account here. Or just go here to see his all his personal links.

Productions (with TV Tropes pages) that he worked on or played a role in:

Films

• Garfield: His 9 Lives (1988): Styling — "Diana's Piano" segment
• The Rescuers Down Under (1990): Character designer, storyboard artist, visual development
• Beauty and the Beast (1991): Visual development and story artist
• The Lion King (1994): Story artist, production designer
• Runaway Brain (1995): Additional storyboard artist
• Mulan (1998): Screenwriter, voice of Little Brother
• Lilo & Stitch (2002): Director, writer, character designer, voice of Stitch^note Credited by his full name in the voice role
• Stitch! The Movie (2003): Voice of Stitch
• The Lion King 1 ½ (2004): Voice of Stitch (cameo/archive audio)
• Lilo & Stitch 2: Stitch Has a Glitch (2005): Voice of Stitch
  • The Origin of Stitch (2005): Voice of Stitch
• Leroy & Stitch (2006): Voice of title characters
• How to Train Your Dragon (2010): Director, screenwriter
• The Croods (2013): Director, screenwriter, voice of Belt
• How to Train Your Dragon 2 (2014): Executive producer
• How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World (2019): Executive producer
• The Call of the Wild (2020): Director
• The Croods: A New Age (2020): Story,^note Sanders was also going to direct the film prior to its initial cancellation voice of Belt
• Once Upon a Studio (2023): Voice of Stitch (archive audio)
• The Wild Robot (2024): Director, screenwriter
• Lilo & Stitch (live-action remake; TBA): Voice of Stitch

Television

• Muppet Babies (1984—1991): Model designer
• Lilo & Stitch: The Series (2003—2006): Voice of Stitch and 627

Video games (all as the voice of Stitch)

• Lilo & Stitch for Game Boy Advance (2002)^note Only a few sound clips.
• Lilo & Stitch: Trouble in Paradise (2002)
• Stitch: Experiment 626 (2002)
• Kingdom Hearts II (2005)
• Disney Friends (2007)
• Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep (2010)
• Kinect: Disneyland Adventures (2011)
• Disney Magical World (2014)
• Disney Infinity 2.0 (2014; dialogue reused in 2015's 3.0)
• Cookie Run: Kingdom (2022)^note as a cookie version of Stitch
• Disney Dreamlight Valley (2023)^note released as an early access title in 2022; Stitch was added a December 2022 update
• Disney Speedstorm (2023)^note Stitch was added in the Season 3 update released August 2023, during early access

Theme park attractions

• Stitch's Great Escape! (2004): Voice of Experiment 626/Stitch

His work provides examples of:

• Author Appeal: Curved lines, Hawaiian themes, long-legged and busty women, adequately attractive men, huge alien spaceships, cute animals (whom he more often or not voices), long, flowing hair, and coffee, to name a few things that he really likes, and often appear in his works. He is also a fan of Elvis Presley, which is reflected in Lilo Pelekai's fanatic behavior towards the singer.
• Art Evolution:
  • Compare Lilo & Stitch to his more recent works, or even Kiskaloo. His proportions have become a lot more cartoony, and it's somehow become easier to count the straight lines in his work. His general skill has also improved greatly, and he has posted a very long tutorial on DeviantArt about how he made one drawing.
  • He used to have problems with making most females and general background characters unique. The practice of drawing different faces really shows almost immediately, and now, all of his works are more or less cast full of snowflakes-territory.
• Descended Creator: Outside of the Japanese and Chinese spin-off shows and the non-American Disney Parks attractions, he voiced Stitch from Lilo & Stitch in almost every project the character appeared in, even ones that came out after he left Disney for DreamWorks.
• Fanservice:
  • Half of his DeviantArt gallery has a "mature content" block over it. The other half is composed of his slightly more SFW drawings of women.
  • Often manages to make its way into his works. Nani and David, the bimbettes, Eep and Guy are all examples.
• God Does Not Own This World:
  • He created, wrote, and directed Lilo & Stitch, but the franchise that his 2002 film spawned had no creative input from him aside from his voice acting as Stitch, 627, and Leroy, and the franchise itself moved on without him after he left Disney. He even had to make it clear that he did not make his film to start a TV series, that it was the guys behind Lilo & Stitch: The Series—not himself—who turned Stitch's alien gibberish into the Tantalog language (the experiments' native language) we know today, and that Stitch's infamous "Meega, nala kweesta!" was not a vulgar way of saying, "I want to destroy."^note He did say that the actual meaning is far worse but considering that he didn't provide said meaning, it's more than likely that the "[I] cannot ever say [the real meaning]" thing was a really meant to be nothing more than a joke and that the phrase is meant to be whatever offensive phrase the viewer wants it to be. That being said, "meega" was firmly established to be a first-person pronoun thanks to several different uses with the word in The Series, and Sanders did confirm (more or less) in a reply to a fan's comment that stated that it means "I" followed by a bunch of asterisks representing "censored" words, so at the very least "I" is part of the phrase's actual meaning regardless. Plus, the fact that he also acknowledges the name of the language, and mentioned (in a comment for an unrelated video) Experiment 375 possessing Scrump during one episode in The Series, could imply that he does see the show as canonical, nonetheless; he just wants to make it clear to the fans that The Series was not his idea and he did no more than voice acting for it. Jess Winfield of the TV shows was the closest person the franchise has to a curator and even he does not have a full say on things.
  • The first How to Train Your Dragon was also co-written and co-directed by Sanders, but the whole film trilogy was handled by Dean DeBlois (although Sanders was an executive producer for the sequels). Sanders also had no input in that franchise's TV shows either.
• God Never Said That: It is widely believed in the Western Lilo & Stitch fandom that Sanders said in an interview that the Stitch! anime, which he did not participate in, is non-canonical to the franchise. But nobody has come forward with any evidence that shows that Sanders has ever said anything about Stitch!, Stitch & Ai, or any other spin-off made after he left Disney in 2007, let alone even being aware of them. It's just that the Western fanbase (who usually hate the anime) have been falsely spreading such things.^note It's also entirely likely that he has heard of them, but he doesn't want to publicly acknowledge them so that he wouldn't get pestered by the franchise's fans about them.
• Hartman Hips: A lot of his drawings have women with curvy, sexy legs. Their upper bodies are more akin to stick bugs. They also tend to dip into bustiness being thrown into the mix.
• Orphaned Series: His webcomic Kiskaloo hasn't been updated since 2008.
• Puni Plush: His primary art style. Over the years, it's gathered some traits of anime-influences, likely because of his occasional trips to Japan. Stitch is basically Japan's Mickey Mouse.
• Ridiculously Cute Critter: Stitch is but one example. His favorite things to draw are; cartoons, voluptuous women, and adorable creatures, really defining the term "pwescious".
• Rousseau Was Right: There is a lack of an actual villain in his movies. His movies are usually about very human, real people going through a believable situation.
• Running Gag: Every one of his main animalistic characters—Stitch, Toothless, and Belt—have all gotten Distaff Counterpart Love Interests designed by other people in their franchises' sequel material—Angel (Experiment 624) in Lilo & Stitch: The Series (and Stitch!), the Light Fury in How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, and Sash in The Croods: A New Age.
• Show, Don't Tell: Unlike most Western animated fare for children, his films include some remarkably subtle scenes where characters just act without talking more than a handful of lines, if at all. Used to great effect in How to Train Your Dragon.
• Tsurime Eyes: Post-Lilo & Stitch, where 90% of the characters were of Polynesian descent, he's kept that particular feature in all of his drawings.
• Typecasting: He usually plays a cute, fuzzy animal. (He doesn't do that much voice acting; he's a filmmaker first and foremost.)
• What Could Have Been:
  • He posts many of these things on his blog. For example, in a cut scene from The Croods, the storyboards depicted Eep and Guy on a date. They just watched things sinking in the tar; it was not going well. Or a scrapped—and second variation—of a sequence from Lilo & Stitch composed of several hundred drawings; enough to sit on, and cover an entire room with. And this was cut... and it was the second attempt. In other words, there's a storyboard of another few thousand drawings out there.
  • There's also American Dog and The Croods 2, both of which had supposedly Troubled Productions; the former film he got removed as director after he refused to listen to John Lasseter's suggestions (and thus it got retooled as Bolt), which prompted him to leave Disney, and the latter film got canceled after several delays, although it got back in production as The Croods: A New Age and released 2020, though without Sanders involved as director this time.

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