As a kid, I wasn’t so affected by the typical ‘traumatic’ death scenes of animated children’s movies. Mufasa’s death in The Lion King really did nothing for me. Same with Bambi’s mom even -it took until I was older to really appreciate the raw tragedy of that. But the one that did get me, much less popular than those, was the death of Littlefoot’s mother in The Land Before Time, and I still think it is perhaps the most effective death scene of this kind in a movie for kids. Both Simba and Bambi lose their parents entirely all of a sudden, but Littlefoot has to be there as his mother is dying, to take in her final sentiments to him, and it is heartbreaking, especially with the emotionally potent detail in the animation -the gloominess, the perfectly sad features. It honestly still gets me a little bit.
I’m just old enough to be part of the generation where the Don Bluth movie most significant to my childhood was The Land Before Time. My family owned the movie on VHS, and some of my strongest video store era memories were seeking out the sequels that had been made up to that time -they were quite big in my dinosaur phase. And I think it’s that immortality of dinosaurs as a subject of interest for kids that has let this movie endure.
Certainly, it was savvy on Bluth’s part, who once again developed the film with Steven Spielberg while making An American Tail. Bambi with dinosaurs was the concept, and Spielberg invited George Lucas to come on to the project as well, lending a little more valuable name recognition.Though the plot went through notable changes, the most consistent theme remained one of different dinosaurs, prejudiced against one another, learning to work together to survive. At one point the film was going to be more experimental, and told entirely without dialogue in evocation of the famous “Rite of Spring” sequence from Fantasia. But eventually the right choice was made to let the animals talk, both for marketability and to distinguish itself from the best-known dinosaur cartoon up to that point. In a bolder move, perhaps spurred by An American Tail’s success, Universal released The Land Before Time in direct competition with Disney’s Oliver & Company on the same weekend; and while the latter film eventually had some legs at the box office, it was Bluth’s that easily topped the opening weekend.
Like its predecessor, a chunk of its appeal came from the formal nostalgia it evoked for early Disney, and in that vein (discounting its surrounding franchise) it is probably the most timeless of Bluth’s movies. Narrated (sometimes gratuitously) by Pat Hingle in a gravelly voice that fits perfectly a primal tone, it is the story of a group of distinct child dinosaurs isolated from their herds, and their efforts at survival through a pilgrimage to a promised land called the Great Valley. Principally the focus is on Littlefoot, an apatosaurus, who tragically loses his mother in a fight with a T-Rex, leading the trek with a stubborn and antagonistic triceratops Cera, a bubbly saurolophus Ducky, a timid pteranodon Petrie, and a silent voracious stegosaurus Spike.
Of course none of these classifications are used, and I think it was sharp of Bluth and writer Stu Krieger to note not only that those terms would be labourious, but that in keeping with a very primitive outlook the dinosaurs would have very basic signifiers for each other: longnecks, three-horns, bigmouths, flyers, spiketails, and of course sharptooths -the very Tyrannosaur who mortally wounded Littlefoot’s mother following and terrorizing the kids throughout their journey. The Land Before Time is Bluth’s first wholly new world and he does well to imbue it with a sense of lore and history -there is a reason it made such an ample space for an endless succession of sequels.
There’s also a more emphatic kid-friendly charm to it, which can be a bit much in some moments where the personalities are a touch too playful or juvenile for the heavy stakes. It could also be a pacing issue -the movie is already very short at just sixty-nine minutes, yet it spends a lot of time on scenes of the dinosaurs trying to get some leafy food from a high tree while brushing over the length of their journey and potentially more exciting avenues in narration, which great though Hingle’s voice is, can be condescending in over-explaining stakes or emotional states. Alternatively though, it defines the kids very well, especially Littlefoot and Cera.
And undoubtedly the range of look as well as personality is appealing in this little troupe. Basically all the most popular dinosaurs are represented (this was five years before Jurassic Park brought velociraptors to the list). And each of them are distinct and likeable in their way. I don’t think its appreciated how Bluth and his animators made these dinosaurs as cute as they did, because they aren’t typically the kinds of animals that lend themselves to an anthropomorphized animation aesthetic. But the animators found ways to evoke pathos and personality in their expressions, and adapted that recognizable Bluth style to these creatures with nothing in common with anything he’d animated before. And again it especially comes through in those moments of sadness, like in the wake of Littlefoot’s tragedy. The scale of the adult dinosaurs really makes you feel their grandiosity -and Cera’s father is almost as menacing as the T-Rex. Once again, the animation is very precise -that gorgeous shot following the “tree star” in the mouth of Littlefoot’s mother, dew pooling in its centre is so mesmerizing. The environments though are often barren and formidable, hand-painted like the classic backdrops of Bambi; and in one beat so expressionist as to loosely resemble cave paintings. There's a darkness to so much of the visual language here, so as to exacerbate the danger for the heroes.
That T-Rex, for as slow and incompetent as its efforts to kill the children are, is a really frightening foe, coming so close at multiple junctures to getting them. The one real mark a lot of critics had against The Land Before Time was that it was supposedly too scary for its child audience. And indeed it is a movie with more than its fair share of peril -the kids from Jurassic Park got nothing on what Littlefoot and his friends go through. Bluth and his team make the terror sequences as dramatic as they can, the T-Rex snapping at the tail of Petrie, stomping hard on the spot where mere moments before the kids had been sleeping. It can all be harrowing, but Bluth is a strong believer in the importance of scarier material and darker themes in animated movies -they were of course a staple of the classic Disney films he was inspired by. Sometimes children do need it for the weight or emotion of a story to hit harder. I know it worked on me. That ending in the Great Valley, the family reunions, paired with the cheesy montage of events from the film, feels like it matters more in light of everything the kids managed to survive. It also should be noted that their journey is a vividly spiritual one -Littlefoot is guided by a vague phantom of his mother, and is himself very much a Moses figure. Such a connotation requires that the trial be arduous to better illustrate the strength of their resilience, together.
The Land Before Time was scored once again by the stupendous James Horner and featured another original song, "If We Hold on Together" performed by Diana Ross, about as big and as good as "Somewhere Out There" but it didn't get nearly the same attention. It has an epic beauty that matches that of the movie, in spite of its relatively short and simple story. This was Bluth's last hit movie for nearly a decade, and the last theatrical animated film to capture the magic and wonder of dinosaurs in a worthy way. In spite of its sequels, it occupies a space all its own, is perfectly close-ended; and like the dinosaurs themselves will live forever in the memory of the children who saw it.
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