Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois, the directors of Disney’s 2002 animated film “Lilo & Stitch,” shared an illustrated tribute on Instagram on Saturday to Daveigh Chase, the actress who voiced Lilo and died June 16 at 35.
The drawing, signed by both filmmakers, shows Stitch perched on a rock holding a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, with Lilo’s handmade doll Scrump beside him and Pudge the fish surfacing in the water below. The rock carries the date 6-16-2026, the day Chase died. The image folds in a detail from the film itself, in which Lilo feeds Pudge a peanut butter sandwich because she’s convinced the fish controls the weather.
Sanders and DeBlois cast Chase as Lilo Pelekai when she was a child, and they have talked over the years about how hard the part was to fill. The two had casting directors searching Hawaii for the right voice and could not find it, Sanders said in a 2022 interview with Hawaii Public Radio. Then Chase walked in. “She sat at the microphone, and she started doing her thing. Dean and I looked at each other, and we knew we had found her,” Sanders said.
She beat out roughly 150 other candidates in the fall of 1998, years before the film reached theaters. “Lilo & Stitch” opened in June 2002 on an $80 million budget and grossed more than $273 million worldwide. Chase’s performance won the Annie Award for voice acting in an animated feature at the 30th Annie Awards in 2003.
Chase was born in Las Vegas in 1990 and raised in Albany, Oregon. She booked a Campbell’s Soup commercial at 7, then moved into television with appearances on “Sabrina the Teenage Witch,” “Charmed” and “ER.” In 2001 she played Jake Gyllenhaal’s younger sister in “Donnie Darko.” The next year brought two roles that pulled in opposite directions: Lilo, the lonely Hawaiian girl with an Elvis fixation, and Samara Morgan, the well-dwelling figure of dread in “The Ring,” which won her an MTV Movie Award for best villain. The same stretch, she voiced Chihiro in the English-language dub of Studio Ghibli’s “Spirited Away.”
She kept playing Lilo well past the first film. Chase reprised the role in the direct-to-video “Stitch! The Movie” in 2003, the Disney Channel series “Lilo & Stitch: The Series” from 2003 to 2006, and “Leroy & Stitch” in 2006, voicing the character across more than 60 television episodes and several video games. Dakota Fanning filled in for “Lilo & Stitch 2: Stitch Has a Glitch” because of a scheduling conflict on Chase’s end.
Her later credits leaned grown-up and often dark. She played Rhonda Volmer, a manipulative teenager, across 32 episodes of HBO’s “Big Love” from 2006 to 2011, sharing scenes with Bill Paxton, Chloë Sevigny and Amanda Seyfried. Her final on-screen work came around 2016 in the indie horror “Jack Goes Home” and the thriller “American Romance,” after which she stepped away from acting.
Chase’s uncle also posted a tribute on Instagram, calling her his “ultra talented niece” and listing the characters fans knew her by, from Lilo Pelekai to Samara Morgan.
Disney released a live-action “Lilo & Stitch” in May 2025, directed by Dean Fleischer Camp, with newcomer Maia Kealoha as Lilo and Sanders returning to voice Stitch. A sequel is in the works, with Sanders set to direct, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Chase’s final public Instagram post, a 2017 photo of her beside a unicorn balloon, has filled with comments from fans since news of her death broke.
