The Land Before Time (1988)

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The Land Before Time is the children’s film about dinosaur grief that traumatized an entire generation. Don Bluth directed it.

Steven Spielberg and George Lucas executive produced. Judith Barsi voiced Ducky. Pat Hingle narrated. Gabriel Damon voiced Littlefoot, a young Apatosaurus separated from his family during a migration. The film follows Littlefoot and four other young dinosaurs as they make their way to the Great Valley, a sanctuary they’ve been told exists somewhere on the other side of a destroyed landscape. Bluth made the film for children. The film is sad.

The original cinematic release runs sixty-nine minutes. Spielberg and Lucas cut the film from a longer running time because they decided the original Don Bluth version was too dark for the target audience. They removed approximately ten minutes of darker material before release.

Some of that material has been described in interviews but has never been publicly screened. The released version is dark enough. The unreleased version is presumably darker.

I admire the nerve it takes to make a sixty-nine-minute cartoon about grief and then refuse to cheer anybody up too quickly. Bluth trusts kids with sadness, and that trust is why I rank it this high. My one complaint has nothing to do with the film itself: thirteen sequels have taught people to think of it as kiddie fodder, and the original deserves better company.

The Death of Littlefoot’s Mother

The film’s central trauma is the death of Littlefoot’s mother in the first twenty minutes.

She’s been defending him from a Sharptooth, a Tyrannosaurus rex, and has sustained mortal wounds. She dies in a rainstorm shortly after, while telling Littlefoot how to find the Great Valley. Bluth paces the sequence like the death of a major adult character in an adult film. The animation is restrained. James Horner’s score is unforgiving. Littlefoot understands what’s happening before it ends.

This scene is the reason most adults remember the film. They saw it as small children and weren’t prepared, and the film doesn’t flinch for a second. The mother dies, Littlefoot has to keep going, and the rest of the runtime is about a child processing a loss nothing will undo. I think it’s the most honest scene about grief ever put in a children’s cartoon, and Horner’s score makes it almost unbearable.

The Five Dinosaurs

The film’s protagonists are five young dinosaurs from different species.

Littlefoot is an Apatosaurus. Cera is a Triceratops. Ducky is a Saurolophus. Petrie is a Pteranodon. Spike is a Stegosaurus. The film’s central message is that the species lines that the adult dinosaurs taught their children to maintain are obstacles to survival. The five children survive by working together. The adults who taught them otherwise were wrong.

The message registers without being announced because the script never overstates it. Cera spends most of the film insisting she’s too different from the others to travel with them. By the third act she’s accepted them.

The transition is quiet. The film doesn’t pause for a speech. Cera is just different by the end than she was at the start, and the audience can see it.

Cera’s the one I root for hardest, because the film lets her be a pain for so long. She’s proud and bossy and wrong, and when she finally softens there’s no speech, just a different kid standing there. That moves me far more than any lesson could.

The Animation

Don Bluth had left Disney in 1979 to start his own animation studio.

The Land Before Time is one of the high points of his independent career. The animation has a quality of weight and atmosphere that Disney’s contemporary work didn’t match. The animators render the landscape with care. The dinosaurs move with the slow heaviness their size would require. The rainstorm sequence around the mother’s death uses water effects that were difficult to achieve in 1988.

The weight is what impresses me. These dinosaurs move like they’re heavy and tired, the rain looks cold, and that storm sequence can stand next to anything Disney drew that year.

The film made approximately eighty-four million dollars worldwide on a twelve million dollar budget. It beat Disney’s Oliver and Company, released the same day, in their opening weekend, though Oliver and Company finished ahead at the domestic box office. Bluth’s studio used the success to fund several follow-up productions. None of the sequels are as good as the original. Most are direct-to-video shovelware that the franchise produced through the 1990s and 2000s, eventually accumulating to thirteen sequels.

Is The Land Before Time as good as people say?

9/10. I rate it this high because it treats a child’s grief with a seriousness most adult films can’t manage, and the mother’s death hits as hard as anything in animation.

The five-dinosaur ensemble has aged well, and Bluth’s animation has a weight I miss in modern cartoons. The only thing that nags at me is the ten minutes Spielberg and Lucas cut for being too dark, because I’d love to know what Bluth’s version looked like. Watch the original and pretend the sequels never happened.

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