You know the thing about the dinosaurs? It’s really, really sad when you think about it.

These beautiful animals lived for millions of years and then one day, literally one day, their world turned into a flaming hell and they died horribly. And they never understood why.

I was thinking about that a lot as I sat down to re-watch Don Bluth’s third film, The Land Before Time, and the last one he made before parting company with Stephen Spielberg. On one level, this is the least personal of Bluth’s early, pre-sellout films and the one that he had the least real affection for. Whereas Secret of Nimh and An American Tail were true collaborations, The Land Before Time seems to have been the point where Spielberg (and new producer George Lucas) really took the reigns and Bluth was more just the guy who animated what the execs wanted. Story-wise at least. Whatever you think about him as a film-maker, Bluth had a tendency to stamp his work very strongly and it does still very much feel like one of his films in terms of atmosphere, if not necessarily subject matter.

Bluth’s films are famously dark and melancholy and I think that’s why this one works.

More than any other movie, this one captures the essential truth that any story about dinosaurs is a tragedy.

So, in a land (before time, no less) the Earth has been struck by some kind of mysterious disaster and all the dinosaur herds are searching for food. Right off the bat, I absolutely love the opening of this movie. We start in the depths of the ocean, past mysterious and weird sea creatures before emerging on land and seeing the dinosaurs at their height. The score is by James Horner, one of my absolute favourite composers and one who did truly phenomenal work with Bluth.

The score is just perfect. Moody and elegiac and yet filled with wonder. I love it.

Also, I think this is a surprisingly well written movie. Like many a dark moody fantasy animation it has an opening narration, this one delivered by Pat Hingle:

“Once, upon this same Earth, beneath this same sun, long before you, before the ape and the elephant, as well, before the wolf, the bison, the whale, before the mammoth and the mastodon…was the time of the dinosaurs…Now the dinosaurs were of two kinds. Some had flat teeth, and ate the leaves of trees, and some had sharp teeth for eating meat, and they preyed upon the leaf-eaters. Then it happened that the trees began to die. The mighty beasts who appeared to rule the earth, were, in truth, ruled by the leaf. Desperate for food, some of the dinosaur herds struck out to the west, in search of the Great Valley, a land still lush and green. It was a journey toward life.”

That is a great opening exposition dump. If you need to have one, that’s an example of how you do that sucker right. First of all, it’s relatively short. It’s very easy to follow. It tells you everything you need to know, doesn’t laden you down with a lot of unnecessary lore and it stands up as a piece of writing in its own right. “Upon this same Earth, beneath this same sun”. That’s beautiful, because it captures the true appeal of dinosaurs. They were real. These fantastic monsters from your wildest imagination, these incredible dragons…they walked the same Earth you do. They looked up and saw the same sky and moon and sun.

Okay, before we go any further. Nit?

Yeah, if you’re in any way a stickler for accuracy in your depictions of dinosaurs this movie will probably induce a seizure. And I’m not just talking about stuff that wasn’t known in the eighties, like feathers. I mean, this movie just took the entire Mesozoic era and put it in a blender. Let me put it this way, if someone made a movie about a modern human with a pet T-Rex, that would be less anachronistic than some of the species that are shown as being contemporaneous here.

You just gotta roll with it.

So our main character is a baby sauropod (“long neck” in the parlance of the movie) who is the youngest member of his herd which now consists of his mother, his grandmother and his grandfather (“he knew them by sight, by scent and by their love.”)

One criticism Don Bluth often gets is that, as his career went on, he betrayed his dark roots and “went Disney” but that’s incorrect. Disney has always been a huge influence on Bluth’s work (he was, after all, a Disney animator for much of his life) and this influence is probably more pronounced in Land Before Time than any other film. Firstly, let’s not be coy.

This movie is basically The Rite of Spring sequence from Fantasia stretched out to feature length. Everything from the design of the dinosaurs to the moody lighting to the depiction of the Earth as this weird, red rocky purgatory. I could literally put a screencap from one of these two movies up here and you might not be sure which one it was from:

But the other big influence of course is Bambi, which Land Before Time baldly apes…

…up to and including the death of Littlefoot’s Mother, who gets eaten by a T-rex just like Bambi’s Mother.

I think. It’s been a while since I watched Bambi.

But we get ahead of ourselves. Littlefoot’s herd is questing for the Great Valley. Littlefoot ask’s his mother if she’s ever been there and she says “no” and so he, quite reasonaby, asks how she knows it’s even there. She tells him that some things you see with your eyes, and that others you see with your heart. On the way, Littefoot meets Cera, a little triceratops whose father doesn’t want his baby girl playing with filthy long-necks.

Oh! Oh! Oh! Do you know what he’s called?

Daddy Topps.

I swear to God. That’s in the fucking credits.

With one exception, all the dinosaur kids (at least the ones who speak) are voiced by actual children. And while this does result in the bad line read here and there I actually think it ends up helping the movie a great deal. Take Cera, for instance. Cera is, in many ways, just the worst. Rude, abrasive, stubbourn and yes, has inherited her father’s disdain for anyone who isn’t one of the Three-Horned Master Race. But the fact that she’s so clearly a child who doesn’t know any better makes it all a lot more forgivable.

There’s also a very subtle but satisfying moment where Daddy Topps growls that three-horns don’t play with long-necks and then looks up and sees Littlefoot’s mother and takes an involuntary step back because yeah, she could literally step on him.

Littlefoot asks he can’t play with Cera and his mother tells him that dinosaur segregation has just always been a thing and it’s best not to rock the boat. But later that night, Littlefoot runs off to play with Cera and the two have fun messing around in a swamp.

Well, it’s two characters have a quiet pleasant moment together in a Don Bluth movie, the camera has pulled back and the music had suddenly faded out. You know what that means kids? That’s right! CHILDHOOD TRAUMA!

I think I’d probably rank Sharptooth a respectable third place on my rankings of “Bluth villains who bought my child psychologist a car”, right after Dragon the Cat from NIMH and the LITERAL FUCKING DEVIL from All Dogs Go to Heaven.

The kids are rescued in the nick of time by Littlefoot’s mother who is badly injured battling Sharptooth. On top of everything else, a massive earthquake splits the Earth in two (Mondays, amirite?), Sharptooth falls into a chasm to his no-doubt permanent death and Littlefoot and his mother are stranded.

And then…

Here’s something I really respect this movie for; how it improves on Bambi.

In that movie, yeah, the death of the mother is shocking. But then it’s “your mother can’t be with you any more” and then smash cut to:

Yeah, not in Land Before Time. No birds chirping happily in the leaves, and not just because the leaves are all dead and the birds are all scaly and weigh as much as a truck.

The movie actually takes its time to show the effect this has on Littlefoot as he goes from grief to anger to crushing depression. And, what’s more, the death of his mother is something that effects Littlefoot’s character for the rest of the movie. It’s why he’s so desperate to look after his new friends, and why he’s willing to put up with Cera’s neverending bullshit because it’s better than her leaving.

Littlefoot meets a kindly older dinosaur named Rooter (voiced wonderfully by Pat Hingle) who tells him that it’s not his fault and that “the great circle of life has begun”. Later, Littlefoot hears his mother calling to him while he looks at his reflection and then sees an image of her in the clouds.

Yeah, forget the Kimba the White Lion allegations, this is where your Lion King plagiarism action is.

Anyway, Littlefoot’s mother tells him how to reach the Great Valley and he sets off. The first dinosaur he meets is Cera, who’s also been seperated from her family and is *checks notes* still a massive tool.

Cera insists on going into the chasm and trying to climb out the other side and rejects Littlefoot’s offer of travelling together. Alone again, Littlefoot is left desolate but soon cheers up when he meets Ducky, a baby Saurolophus.

Jesus, what do I do?

I don’t think I can talk about it.

Sorry.

She’s wonderful. She gives a wonderful performance just so full of life and joy and innocence and it’s not right.

The fact that a part of her will always live on through this beautiful film doesn’t make it alright.

But it’s something. A candle in the dark.

They travel together and immediately you can see the change in Littlefoot. He’s laughing again. Playing again. Healing.

The two then run into Petrie, a baby Pteranodon who talk in skaven speak yes yes and who Mouse really not like, no no.

Probably because this is the only child character voiced by an adult but his schtick just rubs me up the wrong way. No disrespect to Will Ryan, who did a load of voice work for Bluth and also some for Disney (he was the sea-horse in Little Mermaid and voiced Pete in Get A Horse) but this character’s a miss for me. Obviously, we’re doing the Wizard of Oz thing so Petrie joins the other two and their off to the Great Valley.

Meanwhile, Cera is exploring in the chasm and comes across Sharptooth’s body and has the fabulous idea of using it for head-butting practice. This is the scene that forced my parents to sit me down and explain that characters in movies can’t actually hear you and that screaming at the screen doesn’t make them act differently and is a real good way to get taken away and put in the foster system.

Sharptooth wakes up and Cera runs off screaming where she runs into Littlefoot’s herd coming the other way. And don’t ask me how that’s supposed to make sense.

Cera joins the group and quickly wins over Petrie and Ducky with all that girlboss energy. She tells them the Sharptooth’s still alive and Littlefoot’s all “until I put my hoof in the wounds in his side I shall not believe”. They also find a baby Stegosaurous named Spike who provides a little wordless comic relief and not much else.

The gang find some food and sleep in a big cuddle pile but when they wake up they almost get eaten by Sharptooth who is very much not unalive.

After barely escaping, Cera of course, has the class to not rub Littlefoot’s face in the fact that she was right and he was wrong I am of course lying through my teeth she’s a massive prick about it. But! They’re in luck, because they discover a mountain that looks like a long-neck which means that they’re on the right path to the Great Valley. Next up, rivers of boiling lava.

But after climbing over mountains and breathing volcanic ash, the climb the ridge only to discover not so much a Great Valley as a Truly Shitty Valley.

As often happens in times of suffering and deprivation, the dinosaurs start to think “hey, maybe we should put a massive asshole in charge?” and Ducky, Petrie and Spike decide to follow Cera on an easier route and abandon Littlefoot.

This little rebellion doesn’t last long, of course. Cera turns out to be an absolutely terrible leader and almost gets Petrie, Ducky and Spike killed while she herself almost gets head-butted to death by some Pachycephalosaurs.

They’re all rescued by Littlefoot and, completely humiliated, Cera slinks away.

Much like Stalin, having purged the party of the enemy within, Littlefoot turns his attention to the enemy without. Sharptooth stands between our heroes and the Great Valley and that means that Littlefoot has to finish what his mother started and murder that punk.

To do this, he sends Ducky as bait to lure Sharptooth out in the open while he and Spike push a giant rock on his head.

This almost fails but at the last moment Cera arrives to help push the rock and Sharptooth is seemingly killed along with Petrie. Yeah, it’s your typical stupid fake-out death but at least they don’t milk it, Petrie’s fine.

And the movie ends with our heroes finally reaching the Great Valley and reuniting with their families. And, as the narrator solemnly tells us; they all grew up together in the valley, generation upon generation, each passing on to the next. The tale of their ancestors’ journey to the valley long ago.

                       ***

I’ve seen most of Don Bluth’s films (I think that if I died without seeing Bartok the Magnificent I could still consider it a life well lived) and I think this may be my favourite. It’s the movie where Bluth’s strengths are most on display and his weaknesses are least in evidence.

Scoring

Animation: 15/20

On the plus side; gorgeous backgrounds and atmospheric visuals and the movie lacks a lot of the flaws of Bluth’s other movies; over-designed characters and sometimes kludgey animation. On the downside, this movie was made as Sullivan Bluth was transferring from Los Angeles to Dublin and there’s definitely signs of, shall we say, inconsistency from one scene to the next. Sharptooth for instance seems to be evolving faster than a Pokémon from scene to scene. Also, some characters just change colour for no reason. On the whole though, a wonderfully animated film.

Main Character:17/20

Gabriel Damon gives a great performance as Littlefoot. It’s a perfectly standard hero’s journey but executed very well.

Villain: 17/20

He may not be the most layered villain but to this day I can’t here the word “SHARPTOOTH!” without getting a panic attack.

Supporting Characters: 16/20

The decision to have mostly child actors play the child roles really works in the movie’s favour. And sure, the characters may be stock archetypes but archetypes work. Why do you think they were able to get so many sequels out of this. Wait a minute, let me check how many sequels there are OH JESUS CHRIST.

Music: 18/20

Phenomenally atmospheric and deeply moving.

FINAL SCORE: 83%

NEXT UPDATE: 15 February 2024

NEXT TIME: From the highest of highs, to the lowest of lows…