Moses Puloki, sometimes credited as "Kumu", is Lilo's hula teacher in the Lilo & Stitch franchise.
Background and appearances[]
He is very patient with his young students and very tolerant of their antics. However, he is often exasperated by the way Mertle and her hula friends disrespect Lilo, but strangely doesn't do anything about this because it usually looks like everything was Lilo's fault.
Biology[]
Physical appearance[]
He is a large, overweight Hawaiian man with a rounded face, a large nose, and long black hair tied in a pigtail. He usually is shirtless, wearing only a long blue traditional Hawaiian sarong with white leaf designs and a brown lei, and is barefoot.
In the TV series, whenever he is not teaching or performing hula, he wears a green short-sleeved T-shirt with white leaf designs, yellow shorts, and black slide sandals.
Trivia[]
- In the intro sequence of the series, Moses appears in two squares in the hula dance, with his image and movements mirrored to one another.
- In "Spooky", Moses worst fear is spiders.
- For some reason, his surname changed to "Petuli" in the episode "Cannonball", as Lilo called him "Mr. Petuli" when she arrived at the hula halau late after feeding Pudge, though he still had his given name as Lilo referred to him by his first name back at her house after school.
- The classmates often call him "Kumu", which means "teacher" in Hawaiian.
- His voice actor, Kunewa Mook, is a kumu hula in real life.
- His facial appearance is also similar to that of Kunewa Mook.
- While Moses is calm and friendly towards Lilo, he is not very supportive of her. As a matter of fact, he occasionally comes off being highly dismissive of Lilo and will even outright ignore her when she is clearly being bullied by Mertle. That being said, it's not like Moses is very fond of Mertle either.
- Most notably, in Lilo & Stitch 2: Stitch Has a Glitch, Moses is far less tolerant of Lilo than in his other appearances, going so far as to threaten to outright expel her from hula school due to Stitch's destructive glitches, despite them not being his fault. Although to be fair, Moses had no way of knowing this.
- The 2025 remake toned down this trait somewhat, as Moses was shown arguing with Mertle's parents by pointing out about the Pelekais' situation at the time, and that Mertle's bullying made things worse.
- His girlfriend appears in the episode "Frenchfry".
Gallery[]
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