We cover Disney parks and everything connected to them, and Lilo & Stitch is woven into that world in ways that go far beyond merchandise and character meet-and-greets. The original film is one of those Disney stories that stays with people. It is about grief and love and finding your people in the most unexpected places, and the voice at the center of it was Daveigh Chase.
Chase passed away this week from septic shock and organ failure at the age of 35. She had been hospitalized for meningitis and bloodstream infections. Her death is a genuine loss and the response from the people who made Lilo & Stitch reflects that.
Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois, the film’s directors, posted a tribute to Chase on Instagram. They shared a single image of Stitch sitting alone on a rock, holding a sandwich and a doll, wiping tears from his face while looking at a fish below him in the water. No words. Just that image.
If you have seen Lilo & Stitch and understood what it was saying, you know exactly why they chose it.
Who Daveigh Chase Was
As stated by Daily Breifs on X, “💔Daveigh Chase Dies at 35
#DaveighChase, voice of Lilo in Disney’s Lilo & Stitch & Samara in The Ring , has died in Los Angeles
Reports say meningitis led to sepsis
She also appeared in Donnie Darko, HBO’s Big Love, & voiced Chihiro in Spirited Away🕊️”
💔Daveigh Chase Dies at 35#DaveighChase, voice of Lilo in Disney’s Lilo & Stitch & Samara in The Ring , has died in Los Angeles
Reports say meningitis led to sepsis
She also appeared in Donnie Darko, HBO’s Big Love, & voiced Chihiro in Spirited Away🕊️#RIP #ぐるナイ #ฟารีดา pic.twitter.com/FqFwVyiwkm
— Daily Briefs (@Daily_Briefs_) June 18, 2026
Chase was a remarkable actor with a range that becomes more striking the more you think about it.
In Lilo & Stitch, she voiced Lilo Pelekai, the young Hawaiian girl who is grieving her parents, struggling to connect with the world around her, and desperately trying to keep her small family together with her older sister Nani. When Lilo adopts what she thinks is a dog from the local shelter and names him Stitch, neither of them knows yet what they are going to mean to each other. Stitch is not a dog. He is Experiment 626, designed by the alien scientist Jumba Jookiba specifically to cause destruction. The film is about what love does to something that was built to break things.
The film itself had a longer road than most people know. Sanders had been developing the character since 1981 as part of a children’s book that never found a publisher. The idea sat dormant until Walt Disney Feature Animation went looking for new stories and Thomas Schumacher, then the studio’s president, asked Sanders in 1997 to develop it into an animated feature. Lilo & Stitch opened in 2002. Chase’s voice gave Lilo everything she needed to make audiences genuinely care about that little girl and the strange creature she refused to give up on.
In that same year, Chase appeared in The Ring, Gore Verbinski’s American remake of the Japanese horror film Ringu, itself based on the novel Ring by Koji Suzuki. In The Ring, Chase played Samara Morgan, the young girl whose spirit created a cursed videotape. Anyone who watched the tape received a phone call telling them they had seven days to live. The only way to survive was to copy the tape and pass it on.
Samara became one of the most iconic horror images of the 2000s. The film starred Naomi Watts, David Dorfman, Martin Henderson, Amber Tamblyn, and Rachael Bella alongside Chase.
Lilo and Samara. Both released in the same year. Both unforgettable. Both entirely different. That is what genuine range looks like.
The Tribute and Why It Landed the Way It Did
View this post on Instagram
Sanders and DeBlois chose not to write paragraphs. They chose a single image of Stitch, one of the most expressive and emotionally layered characters in Disney animation, sitting by himself and crying quietly.
Lilo & Stitch is fundamentally a film about loss. Lilo and Nani are children trying to hold themselves together after their parents died. Stitch is a being who was created with no capacity for connection and who learns, slowly and painfully, that he wants to belong somewhere. The bond between Lilo and Stitch is the film arguing that love is not just something you feel, it is something you do, even when it is hard, even when you are broken.
The tribute is heartbreaking because it is honest. This is what grief looks like in the world of that film and the directors used it to say something true about what Chase meant to that world.
What This Means in the Context of Disney
For guests who visit Disney parks and encounter Lilo and Stitch characters, whether through a meet-and-greet, themed merchandise, or simply the presence of the characters across Walt Disney World and Disneyland, the original animated film is the foundation of all of it.
The 2025 live-action remake brought Lilo and Stitch back into wide cultural conversation and the parks have reflected that with updated programming and expanded character presence. But the version of Lilo that shaped how people understand the character, the loneliness, the fierce love, the refusal to let go, came from the 2002 animated film and from Chase’s voice performance specifically.
The live-action film draws on that legacy even as it builds its own. For anyone who wants to return to where it started, the original is there, and Chase’s performance is the reason it holds up.
She was 35. She was extraordinarily talented. She gave one of the most beloved Disney characters her voice and her heart and she did it in the same year she gave one of horror’s most iconic images its face.
We are very sad she is gone.
If you want to share a memory of her work or a moment from either film that has stayed with you, leave it in the comments. This is one of those moments where talking about it together feels like the right thing to do.
