Nano Reviews the Land Before Time Fourteenology

[Nanotyrannus]

Not too long ago, I went back to the fourteen movies in the series and posted reviews of them on a site I used to frequent. As I write, that site's usability is going south, so I figured that they'd probably be better off somewhere more stable (i.e. here, a dedicated Land Before Time fan site).  That sums up the purpose of this thread; every so often (perhaps on a weekly basis, no guarantees) I will mirror one of the reviews from that site here, cleaned up and edited to be more presentable and to fit the forum's format and expanded upon in places. After the reviews proper will be a selection of the notes that I took while watching the movie of the day.

Before I dive in with the first review, I would like to preface some things:

• My rating system spans the scores of 1 - 10, though I use decimals more often than not. To explain what the different ratings mean, I will try and be brief: 1 = nigh-irredeemable, 2 = horrible, 3 = terrible, 4 = bad, 5 = mediocre, 6 = okay, 7 = good, 8 = great, 9 = fantastic and 10 = nigh-flawless.
• The early reviews are not quite as lengthy or detailed as some of the later ones; though, even the biggest reviews are not particularly long.
• I must provide a warning that these reviews are not from the perspective of someone who has grown up as a dedicated fan of the series. Though I had the original movie and XI growing up, I once rented a few of the sequels (IX, X and perhaps XII at least) around the time the TV series was airing and I recall enjoying said TV series while it aired on Cartoon Network, I only really got into the series five or six years ago. As such, have very little nostalgia for the series, and many of the reviews that will be posted here are critical in nature.
• I talk about sharptooth sapience quite a bit, so I'll get what I mean with all of that out of the way here: "sapient" in the context I use here = painted with a human brush and capable of things like abstract thought and perceiving morality.

Alright, now that that's covered, it's time to hop in our time machine and travel back to The Land Before Time (1988).


(note: the following review is split into three parts; the first is from April 21st, prompted by a rewatch of Oliver and Company, the second is a short followup to the initial review written after my viewing for the marathon and the third is less a review and more a description of what was set up by the movie - the latter two parts are from either August 17th or 18th.)


Do you know what's better than the mammal version of The Land Before Time? (read: Bambi) The dinosaur version of The Land Before Time, which I watched as a sort of complement to me just having watched Oliver & Company.


It isn't perfect - I think the narration is intrusive in places, Petrie is a little bit annoying, and the fact the movie was edited pretty heavily before release is obvious in a couple scenes (the first Sharptooth scene and the ending respectively), but - all things considered - that was better than I thought it was last time I watched it.

The animation is top-notch, the art is beautiful, the musical score is great, the characters are generally likeable (I mentioned Petrie being annoying, but he must not have been too bad if him being alright in the end got a positive response out of me), the voice acting is high-quality and the whole thing feels pretty dang tight, both because of the writing and because of the breezy running time; after reading the script not that long ago, I honestly have to say that I think that the movie would have been bogged down a little bit if everything from it stayed in the final picture (I think that things like Cera's mother not super-obviously being there at the very end are side effects of this; I don't think her being right there with Topps was necessary for the scene, but apparently her being a few meters away is enough for people to think that she and her other kids died in some terrible accident).

My single favorite thing about the movie is its tone; the apocalyptic setting, the action scenes, how scary the non-Cera antagonists are, the really sad moments, the general feeling of brutality that permeates the whole thing... at the same time, I like that it isn't just a massive conga line of stress and depression, the lighter scenes tend to be effective as well - my two favorite parts are Littlefoot and his shadow and the kids trying to gather leaves from that one tree.

9/10


I don't need to modify the above review because the only real thing I would add is that I wish that it took a little more time to immerse the viewer in the world before everything goes to crap for the main characters; a fantastic movie with a lot of love put into it, even with the executive meddling and little problems.


65 million years ago, the world began to dramatically change. The formation of some key mountain ranges across the world sent the climate into turmoil; the dinosaurs, which relied upon swampy, lowland environments, struggled in the face of these changes, and began to die off in droves. With the dessication of the greenery and the drying of the wetlands, the leaf-eating dinosaurs died. With the disappearance of the leaf-eating dinosaurs, the meat-eating dinosaurs died - those that held on were high-strung and ruled by desperation. Some of the dinosaurs sought out a land known as the Great Valley, a place that remained verdant and habitable even in these trying times. Five dinosaurs - well, four and a pterosaur - stood out by denying the culture of segregation that ruled the lands:

• Littlefoot; kind and brave, but determined to a fault and a little quick-tempered
• Cera; a daddy's girl and a stuck-up, smug little demon, but these were products of her upbringing and her undying loyalty ultimately won the day
• Ducky; a perky, inquisitive and eccentric little creature, and the heart of the posse
• Petrie; a nervous wreck and a generally unfunny comedian
• Spike; for all intents and purposes, a big, hungry dog with scales

Once they had reached the Great Valley, they stayed there and savored their new, luxurious lives with their parents, whose eyes had been opened by how their children survived by teaming up with those outside of their own kind. Even once the rest of the dinosaur world had fallen and the mammals (and avian dinosaurs) took their place in the chain of life, those in the Great Valley would live on.


So, we're off to a strong start with the first movie; will the next movie reach the high bar of its immediate predecessor? I guess we'll just have to wait until next time. Until then, assorted notes:

• I neglected to mention the Fantasia parallels in my initial review, but they're there even before the reveal of the title - I love the weird amphibian's look of utter horror before the pike starts biting at it
• there used to be acacia-dotted, grassy savannahs and lush, Prehistoric Beast-like forests; the drought showed here is more likely than not supposed to be a rendering of what killed the dinosaurs. (either because they were going off of the leading pre-Alvarez theory for what killed the dinosaurs or because they were going off of Fantasia)
• I get that sharpteeth are occupational hazards on the trail to the Great Valley, but do they ever specify if the valley does or doesn't have them itself? (in the first movie, of course)
• Littlefoot's mother stresses their own kind when advertising the Great Valley; that, combined with some of her lines a little later, make me question why some think she is any less racist than the other dinosaurs in the world.
• edit: I think how (Sharptooth) acts can be attributed to how harsh it is in this setting; he's a starving animal in a world that is on the verge of dying, I don't blame him for anything he does
• Here's a story note, and a hot take: I think that Rooter's scene is a little more emotionally impactful than Littlefoot's mother's death.
• I never noticed the look of despair on Littlefoot's face after Cera starts ranting about how threehorns are dangerous and only interact with their own kind before now.
• is "earthshake" a widespread term in the world or just a Ducky-ism?
• Spike, when marching behind Littlefoot, is pretty small - he isn't even as tall as Littlefoot at the back - but in the next scene, he's way bigger; how much time passes during the movie?
• Petrie is an itty-bitty fart; a little over half Ducky's size, small and light enough to fit on her head without her being uncomfortable
• Alright, canon talk - what is the crownheads' deal?
• also, what's with the massive, happy smile Cera puts on her face before snapping at the "monster" that picked her up?
• the script implies that Littlefoot forms (the plan to kill Sharptooth) to protect the Great Valley, but it reads to me as a revenge strike; a little dark to put his friends in such danger to get back at a probably-non-sapient animal...
• a really interesting detail; Sharptooth braces for the boulder to fall at first before Petrie throws the pebble, like he's just accepting his inevitable death
• I'm inclined to wonder how long the Great Valley will last amidst the world collapsing all around it; will it stay green into the Cenozoic?
• Petrie's mom isn't too much bigger than Petrie, maybe a little over twice as big.
• On the note of sharpteeth in the valley - A.) maybe they could be a lot more chill in a paradise, and B.) there is at least one Ornithomimus living in the Great Valley, so...

If I can do anything to improve formatting and/or readability in the future, let me know; goodbye for now 

[LittleDas75]

What's bugging you on Fandom, assuming that's the fan site your referring to?

[Nanotyrannus]

What's bugging you on Fandom, assuming that's the fan site your referring to?

Long story short, the Unified Community Platform.

[LittleDas75]

Oh. Understandable. Hope you have a better time here.

[Nanotyrannus]

You know what, I'll be happy to post the reviews more frequently than I let on in the original post, I have enough time on my hands anyway 

As I said last time, suffice to say that the last movie set a very high bar for any potential predecessors. How does The Great Valley Adventure stack up in comparison?

I won't say anything else here because my thoughts on the movie should be pretty clear from the opening statement.


The Land Before Time II: The Great Valley Adventure is exactly what it looks like on the surface: a cheap, inoffensive cashgrab that takes away all of the charm and rough edges from the original movie and replaces it with failed whimsy, ineffective humor and tensionless, slow action scenes.

The movie's biggest weakness, besides a point that will be brought up later, is that it moves very slowly; just about every scene in the movie drags on for just long enough to be bothersome and the movie feels much longer than it actually is. The first act in particular feels glacial, with scenes of the kids deciding what games to play, multiple scenes of a pair of mildly amusing villains and a full minute dedicated to building up a lame joke. The movie also introduces a musical aspect to the series; aside from taking even more precious time away from the story and dragging it out even further, they are also bad - 'Peaceful Valley' is stale, 'Eggs' is utterly pointless and worthless (and also so bad it's funny) and 'One of Us Now' is a bag of farts.

The established characters are recognizable but watered-down; Littlefoot is nice (too nice and therefore pretty bland...), Cera is pushy, Ducky is also nice and a weird baby, Petrie is nervous and mildly gramatically challenged (I stress mildly; maybe he went through speech therapy after the last movie) and Spike eats a lot. The new characters are pretty interesting, though - Ozzy and Strut are lame villains but have entertaining moments and Chomper is a decent contrast to the crazed tyrannosaur from last time. Chomper's parents really aren't characters so much as they are just excuses to get Chomper out of the Great Valley and (probably) kill off the villains; their scenes aren't very good but they aren't terrible or anything.

The second-biggest downgrade is with the animation; the art is passable enough, though not nearly as striking or colorful as the original, but the animation is pretty stinking poor - I would even say it is below the bar of some television projects from around the time, with how janky some things are (speed-walking and physics screwiness are two big things that pop up a lot; have you ever wanted to see a ten-ton T. rex stumble around comedically with a rock on its head?) and how frequent things like coloring mistakes are. And, of course, it should come as no surprise that it is a mammoth downgrade from the original movie; nothing has any weight to it, movements look strange and unnatural and expressions tend to look cheap and muppet-like.

3.5/10; not as bad as I thought it was last time but still worse than low-key bad.

and some assorted notes:

• They finally found a peaceful valley; I guess they did just get here, so that canonizes the first movie maybe...
• with the first movie in mind, there are two ornithomimid genera running around the Great Valley; this is Hell for an egg.
• smash cut to nighttime, no transition; I assume that ornithomimids are just pests that the valley have to put up with. (context: right after 'Eggs' wraps up)
• Very slight allusion to Littlefoot's mom with Littlefoot being all (his grandparents) have... buuuuuuut then they call their old home the Mysterious Beyond, which makes me doubt if they've left the Valley even though they just found it according to the opening song
• look, kids, eggs being eaten occasionally was in the Great Valley contract, get over it
• This is a tough egg - also, the main conflict of the movie is caused by Cera flying blind into a rock wall and somehow managing to collapse the inexplicably flimsy Great Wall
• I assume that sharpteeth aren't any more or less sapient than last time here - if Littlefoot and the rest of the kids are equivalents of humans of different ethnic backgrounds, is Chomper the dinosaur equivalent of a lion cub?
• the predation instinct is clearly still there... I love Chomper's face when he's on Cera's tail, he's absolutely SAVORING the taste of flesh
• I mean, it could be deduced that (this was also the case) in the first movie, but did they ever explicitly say that the Great Valley doesn't have sharpteeth the first time around?
• the children are magical, they can climb thin air
• Chomper's parents take a while to pick up on Chomper being their kid; were they originally after him in the first place?
• Ducky and Spike at least share a mother; maybe Mama Swimmer hooked up with the Stegosaurus after the first movie... (context: this is referring to that spiketail who appears a few times alongside the kids' parents)
• Uh, if that baby stegosaur is Spike's sibling, did... Mama Swimmer and Papa Spiketail...
  
  I'll stop myself there.

We're off to a rollicking start with the sequels! 

Maybe the next movie will hold up better; that's all for now, take care.

[LittleDas75]

Personally I like TGVA. Yes the animation is a downgrade and it's not the qualities of the oringial but that doesn't stop me from enjoying it. Also just as a warning the animation in 5 and 6 is more of a downgrade in animation quality. Though after that the animation does get better. Though you already knew that.

[Sneak]

In my case, animation/graphics is LAST THING I'm looking at when I watch/play something.
Especially when I know it was made not for for big screens but for VHS.
Of course, I mean cases when it is not that bad, for example. XD So generallly, all LBT movies, even TV series that has the lowest animation quality don't hurt my eyes with animation.

On the other hand, LBT2 is first movie after great LBT1 with its animation, so it's fair to list animation quality as one of main movie's problems, and it's fair to give it so low mark, especially COMPARING TO LBT1.

[Nanotyrannus]

In my case, animation/graphics is LAST THING I'm looking at when I watch/play something.
Especially when I know it was made not for for big screens but for VHS.
Of course, I mean cases when it is not that bad, for example. XD So generallly, all LBT movies, even TV series that has the lowest animation quality don't hurt my eyes with animation.

On the other hand, LBT2 is first movie after great LBT1 with its animation, so it's fair to list animation quality as one of main movie's problems, and it's fair to give it so low mark, especially COMPARING TO LBT1.

The reviews from here on out will mostly be comparing their subjects' animation with that of its immediate predecessor, though comparisons with the first movie are going to be a constant; in the case of III, most of the comparisons will be with how the animation quality has changed since the last movie (I won't say whether or not I think it improved or degraded just yet).

Also, since I put the II review here, the UCP dropped on the site the reviews were originally posted on... 

The review of Hyp's big movie should drop here at some point later today.

[Nanotyrannus]

I don't particularly like double-posting, but here we are.

On a scale of one to ten bignesses, how big will The Time of the Great Giving be?


The Land Before Time III: The Time of the Great Giving is a marked improvement on the second movie; in fact, it doesn't even really act like the last movie happened, so it could be interpreted as a sort of alternate sequel to the first movie if one really wanted to.

The premise is a surprisingly natural way to have a conflict after the first movie (even if its events aren't even alluded to during its 70-minute runtime) - a natural disaster cuts off the water supply, leading to the Great Valley to undergo the same shift in conditions as the rest of the world and to thrust the characters into the same situation they just got out of (well, without the threat of predation). I'd say that it is executed passably; it isn't great, but it conveys the feeling of conditions slowly worsening and desperation setting in well enough, it rarely drags on to the point where I want them to get on with it and the tone is commendably darker than that of the second movie. There are parts that I would cut, mind - namely some things in the middle with the kids' quest to find water. The songs are better than last time but still level out to being bad - 'When You're Big' is a dumb, annoyingly catchy number with a purpose that gets shot down as soon as the song ends and the 'Standing Tough' is bogged down by its vocals and some particularly stupid lyrics, but 'Kids Like Us' is a little different in that it stands out as simply being mediocre; it has nice instrumentation and singing and has a good message, but it comes out of nowhere and is a good example of nicey-boy Littlefoot.

It's something of a shame that the most interesting character is one of the antagonists, and, to make matters worse, the one who is a racist jerkbag at that. His behavior is understandable - though he is definitely harsh and strict, the situation is an extremely dire one and such management is something of a necessary evil (though he absolutely goes overboard at points). If they went deeper into his relationship with his daughter past just a couple of short scenes, perhaps he could have been an even better antagonist (not that he's necessarily "good" in the first place...). The new characters do not fare as well - Hyp is an annoying, one-note bully until they introduce his father, his cronies are unfunny blank slates and, past him tussling with some raptors at one point, his father is forgettable - I'll probably remember the anonymous ankylosauruses that get a few lines over him. The Gang of Five - sans Cera, who gets to show how she has improved since the first movie - are no more or less remarkably handled than in the last movie and Grandma and Grandpa are likeable enough. The Velociraptor quartet are utterly unremarkable and phoned-in sharptooth threats.

The visuals are an improvement over last time. The effects and "lighting" are, for a cheap direct-to-video cashgrab, quite presentable, though not necessarily impressive, and the art is still crisp, clear and not nearly as expertly crafted as what Bluth and his team made in '88 (look at the notes for something egregious that I caught). The animation has gotten better - characters' movements are a little more natural and have slightly more weight to them in particular - but it is still bad. Look to the fight against the raptors at the very end for some pretty bad examples.

Surprisingly enjoyable for something that must have cost only a couple of bucks to produce, for all of its flaws - I'll give it a 5.5/10, and, to answer my question from before I started the movie, I'd say it's at least worth three bigs out of ten (about the size of a lion).

• This introduces the characters in a similar way to the last movie; is this an alternate Land Before Time II more than a Land Before Time III?
• The characters live far enough north/south to lay witness to the Aurora Borealis/Australis.
• More has happened in the first 10 minutes of this movie than in the first 25 of the last one.
• I bet it cost millions of dollars to animate Hyp, Mutt and Nod dancing - immediately after the song, Littlefoot viciously invalidates it and makes it pointless
• I don't think this clubtail is Mr. Clubtail; he sounds way different. (I think it's worth mentioning here that I and several other users on the wiki consider most of the various clubtails in the series to be distinct from each other; e.g. we consider Mr. Clubtail, Kosh and the British clubtail from 'The Amazing Threehorn Girl' to be three separate entities)
• threehorns take long baths and spikethumbs like to play in water
• lol Hyp more or less calls himself a bully
• Littlefoot raises his forelimbs and shrugs, I never wanted to see that.
• Honestly; if I were to conceive a sequel to The Land Before Time without being aware of any of the sequels, it would probably be similar to this in a lot of ways.
• Didn't Topps show signs of pepping up at the end of the first movie?
  then again, I'd be eternally angry too if one of my legs was missing
• Hyp strikes me as the only one of the bullies who is really mean, the other two are just along for the ride
• I noticed the left hypsilophodon's face and laughed, and I went back to take a couple of pictures; one of the pictures, uh...

Spoiler: ShowHide

• I think the pacing has been better this time around - Hyp just drank tar, he's going to die
• Topps experiences a gasp of character development that will fizzle away in a couple of movies.
• This was released two years before The Lost World: Jurassic Park, but it has really similar raptor designs - was the tiger-striped look popular in the nineties?
• Very convenient for that one boulder to have been the one clogging the water; the water flow is nice and delayed, too, the adults have just enough time to leisurely walk out of the way.
• The Time of the Great Giving name took years and years - very likely generations - to catch on; the Old One is one of the valleydwellers here

So, immediately after the first sequel, there are signs of improvement; let's hope that the next movie will keep the ball rolling.

[Nate56mate]

• The characters live far enough north/south to lay witness to the Aurora Borealis/Australis.

Auora Borealis, at this time of year, at this time of day, in this part of the country, located entirely within this mediocre film?

[LittleDas75]

I wonder if your rating for Wisdom of Friends is still going to be 1.5/10.

[Nanotyrannus]

I wonder if your rating for Wisdom of Friends is still going to be 1.5/10.

We'll see when I get around to that movie.


Consistently with all of my other viewings of the movie, I thought that The Land Before Time IV: Journey through the Mists was alarmingly strong.

I'll get the bad stuff out of the way first: the animation has once again improved but still isn't good, it levels out to about mediocre - the character animation is about on par with last time (bad) and some of the prop animation and effects work, namely tied to the flower, are decent, especially for a DTV work. There are also some instances of characters being stupid, namely Grandma, who seems way too okay with Littlefoot and Ali going off into a dangerous territory to find night flowers and foolishly believes that telling Littlefoot's friends that their friend did this won't spur them into action themselves.

Most egregious are some positively botched villains/antagonists; a smart-aleck seabird and a cranky old lady Deinosuchus with terrible eyesight that can inexplicably talk. Had they been silent, they might not have been perfect, but they could have at least been cool and a little scary, but them constantly bickering and spouting one-liners absolutely ruins whatever potential for scary villains was there with them - worse yet that not a single thing up to this point in the series has suggested that sharpteeth even have the capacity to speak, let alone display the level of anthropomorphism that these two do (Chomper was a tiny animal who had his bright moments but was otherwise just a baby predator; he didn't seem to understand too much of what characters said to him and he definitely didn't seem like the type to be able to talk, so he gets off in that regard. More on that next time.) Also, 'Who Needs You?' sucks.

However, those don't detract from the experience too much, and there is a lot more to like here than to not. First off is the simple but reasonably effective plot - Littlefoot's grandfather is sick and Littlefoot must find him the only cure before it is too late. There is a lot of emotional stake in the story, and the scenes that directly address it, such as Littlefoot finding out about his situation, finally managing to cure him and even a very small line when he and his friends find the night flowers ("we've found them, Grandpa!") are unusually powerful. Suffice to say that I think that it was well-executed, especially with the (criminally unmentioned but still-) underlying detail of Littlefoot already having lost a family member, the most important person in his young life, some time ago and him going neck over tail to save the life of one of the very few he has left. The other facet of the plot, Littlefoot's friendship with Ali, is alright; easily its greatest merit is that it continues to explore the theme of interspecies racism that was integral to the original movie, though not nearly as viscerally or necessarily as elegantly. The story in general is much more brisk than either of its sequel predecessors; very few scenes go on for longer than they must and it doesn't waste too much time getting to the main conflict. I think that the other two songs - 'The Circle of Life' (as the credits call it, we at the wiki used to call it 'Grandma's Lullaby') and 'It Takes All Sorts', are good and okay respectively.

On a side note, I feel like this movie and the third movie were trying to set up some sort of overarching story that would have been followed by the following sequels; an overarching story that was dropped as soon as the very next sequel...


Again, the core five characters are mostly not handled remarkably and stay true to their selves as established in the last two movies. However, Littlefoot, Cera and Spike stand out in a couple of ways:

1.) Littlefoot strikes me as a little more similar to his original self here in that he doesn't feel quite as bland; for one thing, his determination is back in full force with his mission to save his grandfather, and shades of him being determined to a fault show with him being willing to leave his friends without notice to save him.

2.) I don't love how Cera is handled; though she isn't bad by any means, a decent amount of her screentime, mostly prior to her being rescued by another character, are her being extremely jealous of Littlefoot playing with that new character.

3.) Spike gets a sudden gasp of character development that never gets brought up again... he learns how to talk!

Two new characters stand out; Ali is imperfect (in a character sense, which is good) and pretty likeable and I absolutely do not condone shipping her with Littlefoot, and Archie is a pretty fun character. Tickles is worthless. 


Though I listed the animation as a negative, it is important to say that I think it has again improved since last time, and the art has improved pretty sharply; the backgrounds in particular are very good, particularly in a far shot of the Land of Mists and in a scene of the night flowers blooming.


This will probably stand as the only Land Before Time sequel I will give this score: 7/10. It isn't a huge, amazing, beautiful thing like the first movie, but I think that it is good in its own right.

Aaaaaaand it's all downhill from here, isn't it?

• Some regions of the world went through dramatically different changes than what was shown in the first movie; some parts became too wet for even the dinosaurs.
  
  Or the world is starting to improve and this is a prologue to either The Good Dinosaur or The New Dinosaurs.
• Grandpa calls his mate 'Grandma' - is that her name?
• The dinosaurs are being driven to extinction by general climate change, not just worldwide drought - I guess even the swamp-dwelling dinosaurs of this world have wetness limits
• If Grandma's tear hadn't fallen on Littlefoot, this movie would have gone way differently.
• The tree reptile can be interpreted as some sort of ornithischian; the Triceratops eating water plants has sharp teeth.
  
  Nice to know that Cera is completely over her racism.
• What is a sea turtle doing in a cave that may or may not be really far from the Western Interior Seaway (what's left of it in the Maastrichtian, anyway)?
• Can Archie and the others understand what (Ichy and Dil) are saying, and if so, why do they not question talking sharpteeth?
• an obligatory cute mammal who is more sapient than the average sharptooth in the context of this point in the series
• I like Ichy contemplating hitting Dil; not everything about them is awful, at least.
• Idea: Dil kills Ichy after he "bites" her tail and the rest of the climax is the kids facing a crazed sharptooth who is flying blind.
• Spike talking strikes me as a natural evolution; he's really young and he's finally learning to talk, stress is just the push he needed.
• Ichy could move to the ocean and live like a normal seabird, but yeah no Dil is completely screwed - if the plesiosaur didn't get her, something else must have.
• I think there was a plan for a continuing story that was executed only through III and IV; the land continually changing as the characters grew up and eventually ending with all of the heroes together.
• I don't think the plan was for Ali to come back in an episode of a janky TV series with an obsession with a Ronno-type character, and to only appear in that one episode.
• I want to see someone try and continue the story that was set up by this movie and the last movie and subsequently completely thrown aside when Grosvenor stepped in.

And that's that; a surprisingly high-quality entry in the Land Before Time saga.

Instead of teasing whether or not The Mysterious Island will keep the improvement ball rolling even further, I will instead say that I didn't expect myself to feel the way I did about the movie when I watched it during the marathon. I'll leave you to deduce whether or not that's a good thing or a bad thing.

[Dr. Rex]

Godspeed with the review marathon! Can't say I would (or will) agree with some of your ratings, but it's good to hear someone else's perspective of the sequels.

[Nanotyrannus]

Godspeed with the review marathon! Can't say I would (or will) agree with some of your ratings, but it's good to hear someone else's perspective of the sequels.

Thanks for the words of encouragement; suffice to say that I've been enjoying putting these here.

Last time, I left on the note of my opinion on The Land Before Time V: The Mysterious Island being one that I didn't expect myself to walk away with. In the interest of keeping things a little interesting, I'll skip the opening paragraph I initially wrote on the wiki and quote something I wrote before I actually started watching the movie back in August:

Before I jump in, let me share a theory on what I think happened for the series to get to the point I'm about to lay witness to

The Great Valley Adventure is released to test the waters with the idea of Land Before Time sequels. Two other sequels, III and IV are either in production alongside it and have a lot more time to develop or are crapped out within the span of less than a year (yeah, JWE was rushed, sure). Either way, in '95 or '96, the classic Peenutverse villain Charles Grosvenor (I'm not gonna elaborate, Nate and/or Mr. Clubtail can explain) and a new crew step in to replace Roy Allen Smith and the old crew - they decide, whether because neither III or IV did as well as II or simply out of preference, to toss whatever was being shaped by the last movie in favor of something that expands on II. V and VI result, before themselves being trashed by the post-art shift sequels.

I'm expecting something that can be viewed as an alternate III like how I see III as an alternate II.

The story doesn't start off on a good note, largely because it has pretty serious shades of a less-eloquently handled III, only a couple of years after its release (maybe this was supposed to be an alternate take on III that incorporates more elements from II...). It opens on the note of the Great Valley once again being desiccated by some disaster and the characters once again having to leave the valley in order to survive (skipping to the end to note that its very, very ending is near-identical with a montage of the valley recovering and the kids standing on a big rock right before the credits). The parts in-between the characters leaving and when they get to the island are unremarkable, the only real interesting detail is the threat of the herds splitting up again that is not touched upon past the first act.

When they do arrive on the islands, things pick up and become more interesting: the kids are marooned on a strange island filled with predators, strange foods and other perils and they must find a way off. Though there are some surprisingly decent moments - action scenes like the tsunami and an inexplicably violent though weightless sharptooth fight are reasonably effective - I unfortunately don't think much is too well-executed. Many conflicts are resolved as soon as they are brought up or are not even conflicts at all; egregious examples are the aforementioned strange food (the kids are iffy, Spike eats some and then they're fine with gorging on the stuff) and a bizarre scene where the kids push a log into the water with the intention of making it a boat. The movie, though occasionally a little slow, is generally well-paced enough.

The second half of the movie introduces a fascinating theme, albeit one that I find extremely dubious in this specific series for a number of reasons: sharptooth being creatures that are no more or less intelligent than the leads. On one hand, this, makes the sharpteeth easier to sympathize with, and opens a lot of story potential - perhaps there are proper villains or heroic figures in the sharptooth world, or perhaps there are societies of sharpteeth with interesting cultures. On the other hand, there is the problem of how sharpteeth are typically portrayed, before and after this point. Previous and succeeding movies treat them; save Ichy and Dil, who are bizarre, constantly-yammering exceptions to the rule; as just predatory animals that threaten the anthropomorphized herbivore characters in the same way that animals like real carnivores threaten people. This is even apparent in this movie; though some returning characters are run through the humanization filter, other sharpteeth, like the shark, the pterosaurs and most egregiously an indeterminate theropod that is decidedly not a Tyrannosaurus, are not - if anything, they're even more ferocious and single-minded than usual. Though one could pass this off as them being angry because they're hungry like in a Snickers commercial, that is pure speculation and it comes off more like some sharpteeth are capable of complex emotion and thought and others are not. There is also the glaring issue of how sharpteeth are occasionally killed in cruel ways simply for following their instincts, but I'll save that for the next movie, and on that note, I will refrain from going to deep into how these factors affect the movie's stab at another tolerance message (to be extremely brief: with how the same message and allegories were presented in the first movie and IV in mind, it feels like someone trying to put lions and bears - and only some lions and bears - in the same social boat as people of different ethnic backgrounds).

These are less actual issues and more lore/worldbuilding notes, but I also noticed some inconsistencies with what was set up in the earlier movies, most glaringly with the state of the world. The lands outside of the Great Valley are portrayed as a green, untamed wilderness, only desertified after the leafgobbler incident; unless this is years and years after the last movie (assuming it happened...), the world is recovering and the series is in an alternate Cenozoic era, this seriously clashes with the apocalyptic setting established by the first movie and respected well enough by the Roy Allen Smith sequels. As for the songs, two of them - 'Big Water' and 'Friends for Dinner' are bad, the latter a little moreso than the former. The other song - 'Always There' - is the best song the sequels have put out thus far.



The characters, after simply being bland versions of their Bluthian selves in the previous sequels, have now gone into the territory of being kind of annoying. Pretty much all of the kids are a lot brattier, stupider and more spiteful towards each other, especially in scenes where food is involved like the opening, especially Cera. Spike has easily gotten the worst end of the deal, though - almost all of his contribution to the story is with him causing problems for the characters, and most of his moments are him stuffing his fat, testudine face. Topps is the only one of the adults who really suffers; he comes off as a one-note, stupid jerk in a lot of his scenes - one big one is one where he blames Littlefoot for the kids going missing in one scene, and after Grandpa questions why he thinks that, his answer is "well, I have to blame somebody!".

Three characters are thrown in return from a previous sequel for the sake of capitalizing on peoples' love of one of the characters: Chomper, his mother and his father. Chomper himself has lost a lot of the charm he had in the second movie, largely owing to him inexplicably being able to talk with absolutely no explanation - he works as a small, cute animal, he isn't nearly as enjoyable when he's singing about how he's going to have friends for dinner. Not that he's bad, just not as endearing as in his last role. His parents fare better; though, again, I question the leap in how they are portrayed, the subtitles they use when "talking" are much less intrusive than Ichy and Dil's dialogue, and Chomper's father in particular gets a few good lines/subtitles. In terms of new characters, there aren't really any to speak of besides Mr. Clubtail and a few anonymous sharpteeth - the sharpteeth, barring a pterosaur that does nothing, are all surprisingly effective, especially the theropod with stubby horns that gets to fight Chomper's parents (though I have to say that I think a lot of how cool Plates is comes from him exploiting the stupidity of the kids, like when he somehow surprises them by jumping a chasm after they taunt him and flips an easy-for-any-sharptooth-worth-their-salt-to-flip rock that the kids think is a good thing to hide under)



After saying that the animation was improving over the last two sequels, I can firmly say that the animation is back to square one: it's really bad, but for different reasons than why it was really bad in II in that, instead of being extremely janky (consistently; there's still some jank in there, look at the Plates fight), it is even more limited and even lazier-looking. The art has gone from decent to bad - pre-established characters aren't as good-looking, new designs are often extremely unappealing, coloring mistakes abound (during Chomper's parents' first scene, Mama walks up to Chomper and calls her mate. In the next shot after her calling, Papa is standing in front of Chomper as Mama walks out of the trees. Quality.) and the movie's color palette is nice and barfy. The backgrounds occasionally look nice but are generally just fine, and often marred by the aforementioned color palette.



I was unsure of what score to give this, but I think it flounders in too many ways for me to consider it simply mediocre - 4.5/10. It could have been a lot worse, but it could have been much, much better.


Yeah, not a fan of the fifth movie  Without spoiling too much of how I'll feel about the series from here on out, all I'll say is that a few of my grievances here, especially with how the characters are portrayed, are going to be constants throughout the next nine reviews.

Maybe I'll... uh... not hate VI as strongly as I used to? We'll see soon.

[Nanotyrannus]

Only now do I realize I completely forgot to provide notes for the fifth movie; whoops! I'll have them in the notes section of today's review.

Though I wasn't particularly kind to The Mysterious Island, I conceded that it could have been a whole lot worse. Well, if you needed example of something a whole lot worse, look no further than...


Right off of the heels of V, The Secret of Saurus Rock... well, it continues the downward spiral.

Right off of the bat, it's boring. It takes almost 30 minutes for the plot to really get going, that plot is over in ten minutes and the rest of the movie is dedicated to - get this - bad luck being a problem in the Great Valley (not that the initial plot of the kids searching for two idiot babies that like to bounce around and scream was any better). Though it isn't too dragged out or bogged down by filler past the glacial first act, it still suffers because the plot is so unbelievably low-stakes and banal. I mentioned during my commentary (incl. further down) that it feels like an overly long episode of the TV series and I absolutely stand by that. The songs are actually not too bad; only 'Bad Luck' is particularly crappy. 'The Legend of the Lone Dinosaur' is a surprisingly fun tune and 'On Your Own' is simply bland. On a surprising note, I enjoyed a few of the one-liner jokes in the movie - two examples I can think of are Petrie smugly declaring that Littlefoot fell because he isn't a flyer and a scene of Littlefoot threatening the audience.

The cowboy/western theme is something of a double-edged sword. I think that it makes sense to try and blend the concepts of dinosaurs and a western setting, given that a lot of early dinosaur paleontology was tied to the latter days of the American Frontier, and because (purely subjective here...) and because a lot of North American dinosaurs lived in areas that correspond to what is the American west in the Holocene. From a purely aesthetic standpoint, and from the standpoint of the one song, I think it works. From a story standpoint, I think it and all of the aspects tied to it; giant magical monuments coming out of the ground over the span of seconds, magical stone teeth, Lone Ranger-type characters; are incongruous and very strange in the context of the world of The Land Before Time.

The main characters, with one exception, are a little bit dialed back from how they were portrayed last time. Ducky and Petrie really aren't any different, Spike doesn't cause too many problems with his single-minded gluttony and even Cera has a little more to her than just "I am grumpy and bratty". Littlefoot, unfortunately, doesn't do anything but obsess over a new character and fret after something happens at Saurus Rock, and he is very annoying as a result. The new characters are very mixed; on one hand, Doc is an interesting, cool new character with a neat design and a lot of mystery behind him (I personally don't buy that he's the "Lone Dinosaur"; even Cera says that he would be dead by now if he were), but on the other, the aforementioned idiot babies are irritating little farts that only exist to make noise, move, and degrade Cera. The sharptooth threats, which are regular-old starving, unhinged predators, are really nothing worth writing home about: the BMMF Sharptooth is an entity for the Lone Dinosaur to fight in a story and nothing else, the ugly-as-sin Allosaurus (with... two fingers...) is generally just mediocre with a handful of decent moments and there's this random T. rex in the climax that shows up just to get its tail handed to it by Grandpa, kick him over and then die a horrible death alongside the Allosaurus.

Speaking of, I will dedicate a special paragraph to how sharpteeth are treated here. In the context of the series at large, their treatment is relatively typical, if not a little more disturbing than usual; the horrible death mentioned above is them being dazed by running headlong into a pillar and proceeding to be crushed to death by that pillar, courtesy of Doc and Grandpa Longneck, while they are conscious. Had this come after IV, this would have been offputting. But, right off of the heels of V, which went out of its way to try and portray sharpteeth as creatures intellectually and emotionally equal to the leaf-eaters (to... mixed results, read that review), it comes off as kind of horrifying, especially with the very kids who learned all of this cheering after the fact.

The animation really isn't any different than it is last time, maybe a little more polished but still on the same level of badness. However, the art is more appealing; the colors are a little darker and more rustic and some of the backgrounds are quite nice.

We're back in the territory of the first sequel, 3.5/10. With how I lambasted V after finding it enjoyable before today, heck if I know what to expect from Pterano's big movie...

Because I forgot the notes last time, this note section will cover both V and VI.

• Grandpa has a point (about how Mr. Clubtail deserved that leaf); the kids are reading as annoying brats six minutes in.
• "Whimsical music! The kids get to eat leaves! Spike is such an oaf that he almost eats his sister!"
• Very explicit reference to the characters having come from outside of the Great Valley.
• Unpopular opinion; I wish they didn't take music from the original movie, it seriously cheapens that score.
• The idea of "another land of plenty" seriously cheapens the special-ness of the Great Valley.
• yes, clearly the swarming leafgobblers are the only reason the lands are barren, it's not like the world is supposed to be ending because of dinosaur-killing drought or anything...
• This movie doesn't know how to handle the first movie and the other sequels, so it's nice to know that it having the kids call the ocean the "big water" is going to be mauled and misinterpreted by the later sequels and the TV series.
• Darn it, Angel Island's fallen back into the ocean, someone call Sonic and Tails.
• This is like 'Return to Hanging Rock' in that it introduces conflicts only to solve them as soon as they bring them up; the kids having to adapt to all of the foreign, unusual island food should have been way more of a point than something that has less than a minute dedicated to it.
• Petrie's fear of flying over a body of water that can't possibly hurt him is really a driving point of the plot, huh?
• I don't like this Littlefoot voice actor as much as the one from the RAS sequels, but he doesn't do half bad; the log briefly not floating is another worthless example of a blink-and-you-miss-it conflict
• I don't think "swimming sharptooth" is a proper term, it's just a term the kids made up to describe this one specific sharptooth that can swim
• Why in the name of Don Bluth can Chomper suddenly talk?
  
  edit: Chomper's charm was him being a small wild animal; obviously, they didn't get that memo...
• I quacked at the way Ducky screams "heeeelllppp"; she doesn't immediately recognize the intimidating, snaggle-toothed pterosaur as a predator.
• Chomper being able to talk because he spent one day with these five is the equivalent of a lion cub in our world being bottlefed for a day after being born and growing into an adult who can speak fluent French.
• I'm still agreeing with Cera and the others, here; Littlefoot, you're going to regret all of this when (Chomper) grows up to bite your head off.
• Plates isn't amazing, but he's in the upper echelon of sharpteeth; I don't like his sounds one bit though.
  
  edit: I think he can understand Leafglish and is actively spiting them
• if the characters stopped feeling like they had weight to them in II, they feel like anti-gravity beings in this movie
• All of that searching for food and a new home for their parents has been invalidated, they found a place offscreen...
• "Because you kids ran off and put yourselves in serious danger, we found food and water! Good on you kids!"

• the Great Valley was founded by galloping Brachiosaurus that were immediately beset by a Tyrannosaurus
• (SLAP) (TRUMPET) "Let me digest that elephant, dammit!" (SLASH)
• the whole setup with cowboy dinosaurs and bad luck belongs in a different franchise
• Seasons are a thing in this movie, but they're going to forget about them in two movies (either that or climate change is even starting to affect the Great Valley...).
• Petrie strokes his keratinous beak and says that his skin feels softer already.
• If Ducky seriously thought that intruding upon Mrs. Maia's nest was anything resembling a good idea, I don't know what to say...
• I don't like Dana and Dinah whatsoever, but at least the characters care about them; they are toddlers, after all, it would be weird and nasty if they hated them.
• Spike comes off as a lot more endearing here than last time
• No, Littlefoot, that clearly is a tree trunk; seriously though, if I went into this blind, I'd assume that Apharji (yes, I have a pet name for the "useless sharptooth") was an Albertosaurus or something.
• Littlefoot's unhealthy obsession with Doc and Saurus Rock isn't any better than babies being dumb.
• Cera glances behind herself and neglects to notice a sharptooth... and when it's right behind her drooling on her, she also ignores it
• This version of the Mountains that Burn score sounds a little more percussive; honestly, Apharji isn't too terrible, at least not yet...
• I like Petrie's stupid reassurance for Ducky.
• (The Allosaurus) biting the log for some reason leads to what could have been his death, dummy.
• What are the chances that everything here is a result of the nocebo effect and not actual bad luck?
• "This valley's nice, but there are others just as nice somewhere out there." I think I heard the first movie dying in the background, sorry.
• I always forget about the tornado scene whenever I watch the movie.
  
  edit: The dinosaurs' comfort must be dropping like crazy.
• This feels like an overlong TV series episode.
• another decent line - "I wonder if all of the other lone dinosaurs talk out loud to themselves like this..."
• Doc is the best thing about this movie by a long shot.
• Apparently Littlefoot doesn't check the sharptooth for it breathing; sharpteeth naturally smell like death.
• Okay, so Apharji is clearly awake and bothered by what Littlefoot is doing inside his mouth; why does he let him screw around in there for so long?
• "Hey, I'm in this too!" - random T. rex
• (in response to how the sharpteeth are disposed of) Well that's (stinking) horrifying, especially with the last movie in mind
• "You never know when we might need a hero! We might need a hero holding out for the... something"
• There's no harm in making sure bad luck is vanquished. Actually, wait, no, you just killed two wild animals to harvest a tooth from one of them to prove your stupid point.

I'm sure you're sick of me trashing the series up to this point, so I will leave you with a tease for next time: my thoughts on the next movie are not going to be nearly as vitriolic as they have been for the last two installments. In fact, they might end up being... I'll stop myself there.

See you then

[Nanotyrannus]

Alright, enough overwhelming negativity for the time being; today's beast is an interesting one, to say the least.


Charles Grosvenor's first two Land Before Time sequels did not impress me. I thought The Mysterious Island had good ideas but a generally bad execution and that The Secret of Saurus Rock was aggressively boring with some distinctly sour seasoning. In many ways, The Stone of Cold Fire should have been the one that completely jumped the shark; in a way, it is, but the product as a whole... well, read on.



The story is as follows: Littlefoot sees weird rock, is told that it is a magical object by some weird strangers, some creepy pterosaurs show up and steal Ducky so they can hold her ransom if the adults confront them on their quest for the rock and the kids have to stop them. On paper, this sounds kind of dumb, and the execution including elements like the concept of first contact and the weird strangers being extraterrestrial/supernatural entities are decidedly incongruous with the world this is set in, but, largely thanks to the reasonably fast pace and some decently high stakes, it isn't too offensive and is even a little bit engaging. The film also tries to expand on the world of the first movie with some very mixed results - on one hand, the scene is welcome backstory and presents perhaps the most darkest sequence in all of the sequels (speaking of - the tone is darker and a little more sarcastic than all of the other sequels, which is cool, and the humor is drier and more effective than usual), but on the other hand, it pretty much completely ignores one of the core themes of the original movie. The songs average out to "meh"; the opening song is nice, the middle song is bland but kind of cute and the final song, though somewhat superfluous (not nearly as worthless as 'Eggs', though), is pretty dang decent. The message will be covered further down.



One of the biggest commendments I can give the movie is that it expands on the two main characters that I think have been reduced to simple window dressing for most of the sequels - Ducky and Petrie. Ducky isn't completely fleshed-out; she's still the happy little "yep yep yep" girl that she's been since II; but her innocence leads to a little humor in some places, particularly when she is paired with one of the villains (more on him later). Petrie is expanded upon substantially more, to something of a fault - though he is a little bit endearing with his naivete and his adoration of his uncle is sweet in places, other times that adoration leads to annoyance - particularly in scenes like when he is point-blank told that his uncle led dinosaurs to their deaths and proceeds to blame the dinosaurs for not flying away. The other three are handled as one would expect, sort of - Littlefoot is his typical bland nicey-boy sequel self, Cera has lapsed back into a less harsh version of her first movie self and - this is why I added "sort of" - Spike actually cares about his sister to the point where his concern for her is what starts the gang's journey, even if his mindless herbivory still screws the gang over.

The new characters are where things get really interesting. I'll get the rainbowfaces out of the way first - their dynamic of one being strict and the other being more lax and willing to help the kids is just fine and neither of them really shine, but their biggest asset is both their biggest point of interest and tied to the movie jumping the shark: they are extraterrestrial beings of some sort on some mission to broaden the dinosaurs' minds with the magic rock (that isn't actually magical, thank Louise) that requires them to not tamper with their sauropsid subjects. I've already said that I think the ideas here are interesting but don't belong in the series so I'll spare repeating myself and get to the highlights of the movie: the antagonists. I'll cover the three of them in their own special bullets:

Rinkus.) Definitely the weakest link of the trio, but not bad. A few of the jokes involving him are pretty decent, especially one after he knocks Petrie out of the sky.

Sierra.) On the opposite claw, Sierra is one of my favorite TLBT sequel antagonists; his voice is great, he has a pretty cool design, his mannerisms are entertaining and he is an unhinged, evil and snarky breath of fresh air in a series dominated by lame and ineffectual antagonists.

Pterano.) Though he isn't my favorite of the trio, he makes a decently but not too-complex main antagonist. He is blatantly a bad guy - he's a megalomaniac who wants to rule the Great Valley with an iron claw and is willing to kidnap children to attain that power - but there's a layer of complexity in that he genuinely thinks he's doing the right thing and that he has a moral high ground (one scene, before Ducky gets kidnapped, spells this out pretty plainly), and he doesn't seem interested in hurting anyone; unlike his gladly-homicidal peers, he expresses regret and snaps at them after they lose Ducky and, as far as they know, potentially get her killed, and he goes out of his way to save her life after she is knocked off of a cliff in the climax. The cherry on top of the more-competent-and-interesting-villain-than-TLBT-has-any-right-to-have sundae is his backstory: him having made a grave mistake in the past that cost the lives of several animals and, in spite of that event haunting him, him being unable to properly take responsibility for what happened or be truthful about what actually happened on that fateful day. He is not a good person - having a little bit of good inside does not a good person make, and I would even say that he qualifies as a villain - but he is at the very least an interesting character.



This movie marks the beginning of what we used to call the "post-art shift era" on the wiki. The animation has improved - it is much more fluid and nice-looking and character animation is better-looking and a little weightier, but it isn't necessarily "good", at least by theatrical standards (which might be kind of unfair, I'll admit). As for the art, the style has changed dramatically - character art is much cleaner and brighter with a little bit more detail and consistency (and no shading for some reason), and the backgrounds are very high-quality. All in all, I think that the movie looks pretty good.



The movie is not perfect, as I have made clear above, but it is surprisingly solid, with a decently executed though-conceptually-dumb plot, passable songs and some show-stealing villains. I think it warrants a 6.25/10; this isn't a great score, but it's high praise in comparison to most of the other sequels.

• Does this take place before or after the Alpha-Bits commercial?
• the rainbowfaces' message of being open to new ideas is a good thing
• The rainbowfaces are definitely maniraptoriforms; I'm split between the old Gallimimus classification and them being "Troodon" as references to the Dinosauroid hypothesis.
• The concepts being introduced here are so incongruous with the world that it kind of works; it's not boring juxtaposition like cowboys and dinosaurs, it's weird and fun.
• Alright, a quick, messy theory as to how this works: this is a world filled with close-minded jerks that are so close-minded that even extraterrestrials are sick of their crap, seeing the close-mindedness be challenged is refreshing
• Pterano: SETTLE DOWN! WE MIGHT WAKE UP THE GROWN-UPS!
• brutal slaughter of a small herd of giant, well-armored dinosaurs at the claws of three Deinonychus; is this in the Clash of the Dinosaursuniverse?
• Spike, for once, is motivated by something other than food - he's a good artist, too!
• Ducky seems aware that echoes are just mirrors of herself - I take it that Saurolophus are more intelligent than Apatosaurus.
• If this were V, Spike wouldn't have even bothered with the flower, he would have started eating the vine before he even stepped on it and gotten everyone killed.
• I hate Ducky's seductive bobbing when Petrie is singing about how some of the worst possible things have been done with the best intentions.
• I think Rinkus and Sierra are fish-eaters; there isn't any proof of this, but still.
• Someone turn the oven off, that meatloaf is bubbling!
• Are the rainbowfaces aliens or the less handsomely-paid staff of the universe?
• Pterano's punishment might be a little severe, but it's obvious that things aren't as bad as they were in the first movie anymore, so I think he'll make it out there.
• The male rainbowface was voiced by one of the gargoyles from The Hunchback of Notre Dame; this movie would have been unbearable if there was a Jason Alexander rainbowface.

And that's The Stone of Cold Fire; what a pleasant surprise!

Maybe the next movie won't be half-bad either; rest assured you won't have to wait until the cold time for The Big Freeze review (maybe; winter's over a month away but I can't control the weather, maybe it'll snow before then... nevermind).

[Nanotyrannus]

It's a cool place, and they say it gets colder. Think the Great Valley is too tropical for snow? Wait 'till you get olde-- I mean until you've seen VIII.


After the surprisingly decent The Stone of Cold Fire, one may hope for a something that builds upon the strengths of that movie - maybe with something with even more great villains and an even darker tone and story.

Well, today's feature tones down the introduction of weird elements that don't fit the series at all, but, unfortunately, it goes in pretty much the complete opposite direction of what was outlined above.



The two main plots of the movie are tied together by a central premise; the Great Valley and the surrounding areas (and probably everywhere north of them) experience winter weather for the first time in all of the residents' lifetimes (a line from Grandpa also suggests that snow wasn't a thing in the lands he lived in before he arrived in the Great Valley either). Though this is definitely an odd addition to the series, it isn't necessarily a bad one, and it opens some interesting questions: when was the last time it snowed in the Great Valley? If the series takes place in a region with a humid climate as suggested by the tropical plant life, why is it snowing at all? Have the signs of improvement from the first movie's worldwide desertification in the last few movies spiralled into the opposite extreme of global cooling? Alternate antiquated theories of why the dinosaurs went extinct aside, they don't do anything amazing with the new element, but they take advantage of it; the characters have snowball fights, they build snow-spiketails, they run from avalanches, they mess around on some ice...

The A-plot is as follows - Ducky decides to be assertive because she is annoyed with Spike, Spike befriends some migratory spiketails, Spike leaves with the spiketails after Ducky snaps at him, Ducky regrets her actions and goes off to find him and her other friends go off to find her. The B-plot is as follows: Mr. Thicknose is a haughty teacher who dismisses Littlefoot telling him that he saw snow, the adults tear into him after the valley is blanketed by the stuff the next day and Littlefoot accidentally makes light of their conversation, Mr. Thicknose's dignity and ego are cracked open like an egg and he decides to help the kids find Ducky and Spike.

Both of these subplots are sweet and have good morals and even have foreshadowing in places, but the problem is that neither of them are engaging or exciting. In the first plot, I don't buy the stakes - with how their relationships and chemistry are portrayed in the movie, I am inclined to believe that Spike would be happier with Tippy and his herd than with his original adoptive family in the grand scheme of things, so I don't really root for Ducky in her attempts to find him. The other plot doesn't fare much better, though its story of a character falling from grace and learning that respect is something that is earned and not bought is at least a little more interesting. On both fronts, there is very, very little excitement, limited to a frankly forgettable avalanche scene, two criminally short and very lame sharptooth encounters and a quick, decent scene of Spike falling through some ice - on that note, the movie isn't very well-paced, with the first act taking up over half of the movie (The Lion King has an unusually long - but not that long - first act too, but it does a LOT more with its first act than The Big Freeze here does) and the movie having three climaxes in rapid succession. The songs are all a very mixed bags, worst to best:

1.) 'The Mad Song' has great instrumentals, a good lead singer and a catchy-as-all-heck beat, but I really can't say I liked a single other thing else about it; even the animation takes a dive during the number.

2.) 'The Lesson' serves its purpose of revealing Mr. Thicknose's backstory, completing his character arc and giving a decent message without doing much else. It's passable but unremarkable.

3.) 'Family' is quaint, but an effective way of conveying the movie's key message of family; I'd say it is another one of the series' rare good songs.

I'll get inconsistencies with previous movies out of the way quickly: Ducky's mother says that there are no native spiketails in the Great Valley besides Spike (this has been demonstrably false since the second movie and up to at least V, there might have been a few in VI and VII gets by with only definitely showing farwalker spiketails), the term "Great Circle" is used over "Bright Circle" and Ducky understands what echoes are and even has a name for them ("Hey! A talkback!"). For these reasons and a few more than I have listed elsewhere, this is where I think that this is a part of a universe that ignores the pre-art shift sequels.



I'm going to get the usual stuff out of the way: Littlefoot is a nicey-boy (who actually makes a mistake in the movie by saying something that incriminates Mr. Thicknose, holy guacamole), Petrie exists and Topps is one-note jerk. However, I do have a few things to say about the other three members of the Gang of Five; for once, Spike is a key character, debatably the central character. Though he shows unwelcome shades of his V self in the first few minutes, he gets his act together pretty fast, and he is simply portrayed as a sweet and very young child who is torn between worlds for most of the rest of the movie. Ducky has been given an assertive-ness boost to a fault, both in terms of the story and in terms of enjoyment; she comes off as kind of annoying in a lot of her scenes in the first act. Thankfully, she is pleasant enough otherwise; her struggle between her frustration with Spike and her love of him balance out the annoyance and her typical Ducky-ness. Cera is definitely the one who suffers the most; it is this movie that finally solidifies her as little more than a ball of anger and brattiness, with her singing about how to be angry to Ducky (who... can't feel anger... I think some flanderization was building with her too, but I didn't notice it because of how utterly useless she was in most of the sequels before VII) and her screaming with rage being one of two foreshadowed things that solves the second of the three climaxes.

The new characters are also a mixed bag. Tippy is a playmate for Spike and the other spiketails are blank slates, but Mr. Thicknose has a little bit of intrigue - he is a character who only has his feeling of self-worth to bounce off of, and that being broken leads him on a journey of self-discovery - I made that sound more interesting than it actually is. The late Robert Guillaume does a good job in his role.



The animation hasn't changed much from last time; sometimes it comes off as a little better, other times it comes off as a little worse. The art is where things have really improved - the characters' designs have been refined, characters have much more consistent shading, the colors are pleasing to the eye and the backgrounds look even better than last time. Again, the movie looks good... outside of instances where the characters' faces turn into silly putty.



The sweetness and good morals and the pleasantness keep this from being bad, but it is far from being good. I think a 5/10 is a fair score here.

• Why is Spike's chin so prone to losing its colors?
• Apparently the dinosaurs independently figured out how evolution works.
• Why do spiketails use their heads to knock food from trees and not their tails?
• Grobble
• (magical whimsical music as Littlefoot walks through the underbrush)
• "Spike lost his parents" err, more that he was ditched by his parents and left as food for eggstealers
  
  "There were no other spiketails in the Great Valley (until now)" There goes the canonicity of all of the pre-art shift sequels!
• I quacked at Grandpa being passive-aggressive. (context: "Do you still like the ground sparkles, Littlefoot!?")
• Thicknose should be faring better in these conditions than the other species, given that (certain species of) his kind are found pretty far north.
• VII is unquestionably canon to this movie; by extension, so is the first movie.
• I wonder if Mrs. Swimmer had to go through a similar situation to what Ducky is going through here when she was little (but with a biological sibling and not a spiketail, obviously).
• The Tyrannosaurus design is inexplicably dramatically different, more Chomper-esque; I headcanon that they're sub-adults but, let's be real here, they're retconned like every other stinking thing in the post-art shift series.
• The ultimate sharptooth. Knocked out by a big ball of snow.
• I think it's a good time to point out that the non-avian ornithodirans in the series are probably warm-blooded (or at least mesothermic) if they can survive these conditions in the first place.
• a 2 or more-ton Pachyrhinosaurus slipping around on ice like a dog, sure
• Hold the phone - how did the hot spring freeze over in the first place??
• That is not enough green food to feed the entire Great Valley.
• Even with the log, (the sharptooth) had all of the chance in the world to right himself after he was hit by it, but he let it drag him into the abyss - don't give me any crap about the snow on the ground, he didn't even try to put himself back on it.
• This is the last sequel that uses the first movie's score past a scene a piece in IX and XI.
• This movie has three climaxes that are over in heartbeats; the final battle against Gottahurt (yes, I have a pet name for this sharptooth too), re-opening the valley gap and Mama Swimmer saving her son.

Next time on the TLBT marathon...

Spoiler: ShowHide

  HE COMES

[Nanotyrannus]

Without spoiling too much right off the bat, today's review is... er... not particularly glowing.

Before the review, I'll say that, when I watched this in August, I had been awake for 30 hours straight. Make of that what you will.


So: The Stone of Cold Fire was a breath of fresh air with some dumb-as-bricks ideas and The Big Freeze was bland - but not exactly bad - with some ideas that aren't too out-of-place in the world, and Journey to Big Water... uh... read on.



I will at least say that the story presents interesting ideas - some of which that are stolen from another piece of dinosaur media altogether, but I digress for the time being. The climate chaos introduced in the last movie is at it again: torrential downpours unlike any the dinosaurs have ever seen before are inundating the lands, particularly the Great Valley, while the core children are bored. A couple of creatures are swept over the walls of the valley by the floods; one who Littlefoot befriends and introduces to his friends and another who is not quite as friendly. Concerned about his safety and given incentive to help him after an earthquake, the kids take it upon themselves to bring their new "mud brother" back to the ocean. Though, again, there are decent ideas here - marine life is a welcome addition to the series - once again, the story is boring, and, like in VIII, low stakes because I don't care about the central conflict (in fact, I'm kind of rooting against it...). The first act once again dragging on for almost half of the thing and the second act being a flash in the pan do not help matters, nor does the absolute mountain of filler and fluff that fills the thing. If one were to cut out parts of the movie like the kids being bored, kids accusing Mo of being Littlefoot's imaginary friend, several sequences of the kids travelling and a few botched peril sequences, I'm willing to bet that the movie would only be around a half-hour long.

Though most of the action scenes suck, a few of the ones involving the sharptooth swimmer are bizarrely great - more on him later - and the scenes with the Diplodocus mom are cute; unfortunately, the climax, which is generally the best scene in the movie thanks to the aforementioned sharptooth swimmer, is cheapened beyond repair by a copout - Mo, who is very heavily implied to have died to save his friends and whose death almost sets up a message of accepting failure and looking for the good in bad things happening, inexplicably shows up just fine and explains how he survived by splashing around a whole lot without any of the exciting visuals of the actual climax and all of the annoyance of the character. The songs are weird: 'Boring' (let's call it that) is 2 or 3 minutes of the kids complaining about being bored and is insufferable as a result, 'Imaginary Friend' is a complete abomination of a song and 'No One Has To Be Alone', though great in its own right and the best of the sequel songs, feels very out-of-place and kind of random.

So, before we get to the characters, let's talk influence: as aforementioned, the movie very prominently features marine life, namely an Ophthalmosaurus named Mo and an anonymous Liopleurodon. If you are familiar with dinosaur media beyond Jurassic Park and The Land Before Time, you may recognize these names from somewhere - they are the two primary focus animals of the Walking with Dinosaurs episode, 'Cruel Sea'. Aside from the species choices being suspect in of themselves, matters are made worse by their color schemes being almost identical to their BBC counterparts. It isn't as obvious with Mo, given that he is a mix of very bright yellow, purple and red, but his water-kin - being the same pale yellow and purple/brown that the ophthalmosaurs were in the documentary, or more specifically as they were in a render that the creators of IX must have had easy access to in 2001/2002 through the archaic internet - are far less subtle and frankly kind of dumbfounding. No credits are given to the BBC or Impossible Pictures for inspiration in any way in the credits, so I am going to treat all of these similarities as plagiarism - and, though cool, negatives in the grand scheme of things.



I'm not even going to bother going into detail on how the core main characters are portrayed because they are just as bland and one-note as they were in V once you look past them being bored in the opening, Littlefoot wanting a friend, a few brief, glorious moments of Cera being terrified by a little crab and Cera trying to actually be mature after the could-have-been great climax. The new characters, with the exception of one, are either nothing to write home about - the mother Diplodocus - or a very annoying waste of animation that only exists to appease toddlers and is ever-miserably central to the plot  - Mo. Thankfully, there is one good character - the sharptooth swimmer, who is perhaps the scariest and most interesting of all of the sharpteeth introduced in the sequels. He comes off as a marine equivalent to Sharptooth (not in the sense of him being a ripoff of Monstro, though) in the best possible way.



The animation, I would say, is a bit of a step down from last time. Though the faces aren't as weird and the colors are a little brighter, I think that the animation is cheaper and more stilted, there is some very strange shading in several shots and there is a surplus of very poor-quality CGI. The backgrounds are still good, at least - the underwater ones in particular are very nice - and some of the water effects look alright.



I think that this was pretty easily the weakest sequel so far; even more boring than the already-ruinously boring II. I am confident in saying that the 2.5/10 I last gave this was warranted; harsh, but warranted.

• Swimmers have a problem with muddy nesting areas?
• "I wish my mom had given me a brother, and then I'd always have someone to have fun with."
  
  She gave you several. It wasn't her fault that they didn't make it past the embryonic stage.
• I think Littlefoot is kind of annoying here, but I'll concede that he's showing a little more character here than usual; he's childlike in how he just wants to have fun.
• It's taken them a really long time to get around to introducing Mo; most of the movie until the 18 minute mark has been dedicated to the kids being bored and everyone complaining about water.
• It would have been interesting if they made Mo distinct from Littlefoot and the others by having him be to dinosaurs what dolphins are to humans (I know ichthyosaurs aren't dinosaurs, bear with me) instead of just another kid; as he is he just comes off as a weird mermaid.
• Ducky accidentally offending Mo leads to like 4 minutes of the kids denying Mo's existence; it doesn't serve the plot and it only gives way to...
• ME HAVE A FRIEND. A VERY SPECIAL FRIEND. BUT NOBOD CAN SEE ORHERE HIM AEVER DAY I SAY HE MAKES ME HAPPY WHEN ME SCARY SHARPTOOTH MUST BE NO HE SHORT AND HE NICE NO TEETH AND BEST OF ALL, HE IMAGINARY? HE IMAGINARY. IMAGINARY. OH IMAGINARY FRIENDS ARE PLAY. HAPY WHEN YOU SAD, THEY ALWAYS BELIEVE EVERYTHING YOU SAY. NANANANANANANANANANANANANANANAN IMAGINARY. NANANANANANANANANANANANANA IMAGINARY.
  
  WHY WOULD YOU WNT A DUMB FRIEND? HE"S NOT REALLY AIR HOW CAN NOBODY BE THINK BE SMART? THEY NEVER EVER GO THEY GO AND WHATEVER YOU ALWAYS RIGHT. OH IMAGINARY FRIENDS ARE MAGICAL FRIENSS> THE SMALL AND BIG ONES> BAMY FIRNEDS@ EVERYBODY EBERYBOERYB ODBERIRBEOREBRYERO EBROBERY EVEYROBYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY RVEYRTOBE OREAFKENFGOIEGF
  
  AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAASNSNSNSNNSNSNSNSNSnnANSNASKNASNANANANANA
  
  IMAGINARY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
  
  
  Spoiler: ShowHide

  
• The earthquake scene is the only thing that stood out to me about this movie when I first watched it in 2007/2008.
• This is the first serious valley earthshake that the series has ever seen; didn't they come here to get away from all of this? Between this and the climate change trouble that started in the last movie, is the Great Valley starting to fall apart?
• They do not know what to do with the running time; half of the movie up to the 36 minute mark has been fluff and filler.
• Littlefoot, show a little anger over that stunt (where Mo scares the kids by supposedly trapping himself), show an emotion other than "we were worried!" and "yay! The good boy!", please, for the love of God...
• the kids are walking through some distinctly Paleozoic landscapes, it takes them at least one day to get as far as they do in the slow montage of them walking.
• V probably didn't happen in this universe, so I take it that they sang 'Big Water' and went there once some time ago in some never-before-seen adventure.
• The sauropodlets look like Diplodocus versions of Tricia.
• Skywater > heatwaves, according to Petrie; they've reached brackish water.
  
  Speaking of: were marine reptiles capable of surviving in freshwater?
• The Liopleurodon is scary because it's such an alien threat for the series; all of the other sharpteeth before now have been lesser clones of Sharptooth or lame comedy villains, Leo here takes the template of Sharptooth, applies it to a marine animal and has a decent amount of fun with it.
  
  The scene is really effective; probably the best sharptooth "fight" of all of the sequels.
  
  edit 2: I don't buy Mo being able to close the pliosaur's mouth for a second but that's so brief that it doesn't detract from him; this 70ft+ animal can jump like a boss.
• In a perfect world, Mo died here; wouldn't it have been really ballsy and mature if what Cera told Littlefoot on the matter was tied to the moral of the movie and not just garnish for a godawful bait-and-switch of him inexplicably surviving?
• (the sharptooth swimmer) smelled the ocean and just yeeted, leaving a perfectly good meal; he's not on par with Sharptooth, just close, for a few reasons...
• 1:05:44, Cera mentions that the Smoking Mountains are the way home; almost a whole minute later through some fancy echolocation technology, it is revealed that the kids' home is immediately to their left and that this entire journey could have been exponentially shorter.
• I think this is the last time they use the theme with the choir from II; the scene of Littlefoot diving wasn't necessary, but it was a decent showcase of one of the movie's very few strengths.

Well that was dour.

Up next is the sequels' biggest milestone: the big 1-0, the big letter X, the great migration of the great longnecks. Will it be a worthwhile venture, or... will it...

 

Strap in, folks; the next couple of movies are going to be bumpy rides.

[Nanotyrannus]

Huh, I'm talking to myself an awful lot here... that aside, it's time to tackle what might just be the biggest and most ambitious of all of the sequels: The Land Before Time X: The Great Longneck Migration.

Before I get started, I'll mention here that Littlefoot's mother is addressed by the non-canon name "Louise" in a couple of the notes.



So it comes to this. Ten movies. Nine sequels. 15 years. Is The Great Longneck Migration any good? We-he-hell, let's see...



I will commend X for its ambition; the movie feels much bigger than the other sequels, with its longer running time, its journey across sweeping landscapes, the story of (apparently) saving the world from a cataclysm and Littlefoot having an encounter with someone that changes his life. Unfortunately, I think that little of it works - the journey to the crater isn't all that exciting but at least has pretty backgrounds and music; the save-the-world plotline, though mercifully only conveyed through the sauropods witnessing an unusually hectic eclipse with their eyes closed and assuming that they pushed the sun back into the sky, is still a bit of a stretch for the series; and, unfortunately, things really fall apart once Littlefoot meets the big new character of the day, Bron, which I will elaborate upon when I get around to discussing him - all I will say here is that I absolutely do not buy the stakes of Littlefoot wanting to be with him and that his backstory, well, wait for the next paragraph. Suffice to say that little else improves the story: the comedy is very rarely effective, only one emotional moment (the final song) leaves any impact and the action scenes - well, to be frank, calling any of the ones past the second crocodile encounter "action scenes" is an insult to action scenes everywhere.

As the big tenth movie, and with it making an effort to reference the first movie more than ever - it comes off to me like they made the movie just for fans of the original, it doesn't feel like any of the other sequels really matter even with a handful of visual cues nodding to a handful of them - one would hope that the movie takes some care to treat its source material with some level of respect. Well, you'd be a damned fool to think that way, this is a Grosvenor-era TLBT sequel. Probably the best way to illustrate the matter is with the portrayal of the world outside of the Great Valley: even though I've tried to pass off the increasingly verdant Mysterious Great Beyond (alright, that's a welcome change from the other sequels, I'll admit) as the world improving since the first movie, this one makes it abundantly clear that the apoclayptic conditions from that movie - the very catalyst for the series happening in the first place, the sole reason the characters sought out the Great Valley - has been completely retconned out of existence. Until the Great Earthshake comes along and burns everything (???), the valley that everyone lived in in the first place (???) was verdant and completely fine, and the nest that Littlefoot lived in since he hatched was secure (!?!?!?!?!?). Bron's reasoning for wanting to find the Great Valley all but confirms the retcon; instead of wanting to find the valley for food, he explains that he and his mate wanted to find the Great Valley to make sure his family was safe... even though valley in the first movie was simply a massive food store in the first movie and the lack of sharpteeth was an invention of the sequels. With the other Grosvenor-directed Land Before Time sequels in mind, it begs the question; between the lack of understanding of the themes and the basic world that it set up, did the creative team behind the sequels after Roy Allen Smith left even watch the first movie, or did they just have a list of things that happened in it on hand and try to build off of that without actually knowing what in the name of Bluth they were doing?

On a lighter note, the songs boomerang; the first song, 'Adventuring', is passable. The second song, 'Me and my Dad', is irritating for a tsunami of reasons. The final song. The last song, 'Bestest Friends', is surprisingly great, even if I don't buy the setup for the song (its credits reprise is strong as well).



Once again, I feel little need to go deep into most of the main characters because they are once again one-note and forgettable shells of their former selves, but I do have things to say about Cera and Littlefoot. First of all, I think Cera is a little more noble than she was in the previous sequels, namely with her choosing to stay by an injured character at one point, but at the same time, she is otherwise no more or less complex than she was in VIII or IX. Littlefoot, the star of the movie, is slightly more-two dimensional than usual (in comparison to his usual one-dimensional self), even if he is still a nicey-boy: he acts a lot more like an actual kid than usual, with him getting himself into danger because he wants to play and him initially being somewhat hurt when he is told by his grandfather that Bron is his father (though that melts and gives away to him playing with him after... rgghhh). Grandma and Grandpa get to shine a little more than usual and are likeable enough, and Topps is mercifully completely absent outside of two quick gags that have nothing to do with his bland, typical self.

Three of the new characters are not particularly remarkable. Sue is just kind of there, Pat is a cool-ish old guy and Shorty is a more-well-executed-but-still-not-good version of Hyp. Bron, however, is a very different beast. On one hand, he is nice and he has a good introduction, and he is portrayed very well by Keifer Sutherland. On the other hand, his backstory utterly poisons him: as he tells it, he abandons his mate and unborn child to find the Great Valley (which has some pretty clear directions to follow, by the by), fails to find it over the course of over five years (this is an estimate going off of production art for the first movie, but still, he had all of the time between leaving his family and the Great Earthshake...), comes back to find his home literally up in smoke, looks for his mate and kid for a few days before Rooter says his wife is dead and he decides to stop trying to find his son after he (begrudgingly) adopts some randos. Because of all of this, he reads as an inept deadbeat; none of his nice conversations with Littlefoot or play sessions mask the fact that he up and gave up on looking for his son when, as far as he knew, he was out there alone in the Great Beyond. None of the mentions of him being wise mask his inability to walk west in a straight line for a couple hundred miles.

Alright, onto the sharpteeth, because they are... interesting. I'll get the crocodile out of the way first, it's fine; it's nothing great or good but it's not a terrible threat. In fact, because of how irritating the kids are in some of its scenes, it's easy to root for. Unfortunately, it is one of four sharpteeth in the movie, and the other three - some technicolor Tyrannosaurus - stand out as the most worthless sharpteeth up to this point. They come off as some of the weakest and least functional creatures in the franchise; they barely seem to know how to do much more than stand around and roar, they don't seem to have senses of smell, the very few blows they inflict on the characters leave no effects on them (seriously: Bron gets bitten in the leg by one of them and all it garners is a pained grunt) and they are startlingly fragile: the red and gray ones in particular are felled by tiny pebbles and a strange effort by Cera and Shorty respectively.



The animation is about on par with last time, with two differences I can point out: the backgrounds look a lot better to my eye and horrible CGI has taken over the world and ultimately drags down the animation quality as a whole.



The more I wrote here, the colder my view on this movie became. I was initially not sure what to give it; I was split somewhere between a 4/10 and a 3.5/10; but, the more and more I think about it, the more I realize that a good song and a few strong elements are not nearly enough to save this from a 2.5/10.

I went adventuring, but at what cost?


Before the notes, I'd like to point out that I only barely settled with a 2.5/10 after the rewatch; in fact, my initial score for the movie by the time I had written all but the final paragraph was a flat 2/10, and I only bumped it up because I conceded that it was probably a little harsh (Nate agreed with this notion).

• Littlefoot here sounds older than any of the other Littlefoot voice actors.
• The kids bait one of their best friends into hurting herself on a rock, pleasant.
• You five regularly go on harrowing adventures and only now do you sing about the prospect of going on one???
• The crocodile has problems with subtlety - Ducky, your kind are built for swamps in this universe, you should love this place.
• Apparently sharptooth skin has a similar enough texture to rock for the kids to mistake Smasher (read: the awful gray sharptooth) for one; he looks absolutely MASSIVE when they're close up on him.
• One of the themes from II is given a bit of a reprise at a point - how big was the asteroid that left the crater?
• "This is your father. He was dead in context of the first movie, but he's back."
  
  I think one of the anonymous longnecks yells "oh, my God!" when Littlefoot is running away.
• Alright, so picture this: in a decidedly green valley filled with various kinds of sauropod, Bron decides to abandon his mate, Blue Louise, to look for the Great Valley, which is semi-easily reached by going west for long enough. He comes back to find the green valley up in smoke, burned to a crisp by tectonic activity and his nest swallowed up by the Big Underground that his mate and parents-in-law didn't move from in the five years since he ditched them. He navigated a canyon, some rain, a luscious, verdant plain (??!?!?!?!?!?!??) and some rocks over the course of several days before Rooter told him that Sharptooth killed Louise but he didn't know what happened to Littlefoot. One day, in a wonderful green woodland, he saw a young brachiosaur shielding some Camarasaurus and Diplodocus calves. Noticing that Littlefoot wasn't among them, he abandoned the babies and only begrudgingly let them follow him. He got used to them and let some other sauropods gang up with him.
  
  The only detail Littlefoot gleams from Bron's story of failing to be a good father and abandoning his family is that he is the leader of a whole herd and that his mother would have been proud of him.
• oh, and he sings about how cool this deadbeat pile of stem-bird red meat is
• apparently Littlefoot didn't pick up on the detail of Shorty being one of the young'ns Bron found; one of the babies that was alongside him clearly hasn't grown since Bron found him a few days after Louise died, I bet it's only been a few months since the first movie ended in this universe.
• one day, the moon pushed the sun out of the sky because it was jealous and a bunch of sauropods threw it back into orbit (yes, the orbit around the Earth, dinosaurs have figured out how evolution works but they're still flat-earthers)
• Bron's view on sharpteeth is that they're all cowards, too chicken to hunt a large herd; they are habitual pack-hunters, they hunt in pairs and trios.
  
  Friendly reminder that his mate was killed by a completely fearless Tyrannosaurus that hunted by itself.
• I got distracted, pressed a button and made the movie Spanish; Littlefoot's Spanish name is El Pequinio (????).
• Crusher (the red sharptooth) is more concerned with looking cool and roaring than with actually attacking Pat, and he is felled by a handful of tiny pebbles.
• Why are all of the rexes more concerned with screaming and looking cool than with actually killing the sauropods they're hunting?
• Thrasher's (the green rex... yes, all of my X rex pet names end with 'sher) defeat is understandable given that his two attackers are two giant (elderly) Apatosaurus.
• I won't fault (the sharpteeth) for being afraid of the event; if anything, all of the characters should be panicking like that in the face of an eclipse, a tornado, and a thunderstorm all in one.
• They're all still looking at the eclipse (particularly the sharpteeth, they're just roaring and glaring at it dumbfoundedly); they're all going to go blind.
• Littlefoot opens his eyes prematurely, he's going to die; the sun being right behind the moon is the only point in which it's safe to look at an eclipse, if it's not completely obscured you're destroying your eyes
• They make a point of having Pat live in the Great Valley with the kids, but he never shows up ever again.
• Threehorns feel pain when they ram into things, they just grin and bear it.
• Bron assumed his son was alive until now but just chose not to look for him... "dad" and "deadbeat" start with the same letter.
• I'm not happy that Littlefoot is staying with his friends and grandparents, I'm happy that he's not staying with that loser.
• The narrator point-blank says that Littlefoot and his father will have more adventures together; was that one TV series episode already planned at this point?

Instead of stoking false hopes that I'll be nice to the next movie, I'll say that, if you like XII, maybe you'll agree with at least some of what I have to say in the review after the next.

Until then, take care 

[Nanotyrannus]

I'm not going to beat around the bush here today.


I think X made sense as a series finale - even though it was terrible in a lot of ways and a red-hot stab in the belly of the world set up by the first movie, its premise, its length and even its presentation and score made it feel like like it was supposed to be a sensible end to the decalogy.

Apparently the people behind this movie thought that a sensible follow-up to "Littlefoot saves the world and meets his long-lost father" was "Littlefoot ruins a special day for everyone in the Great Valley, blames tiny sauropods and then befriends said tiny sauropods".

Yeah, I'm not going to waste any time, Invasion of the Tinysauruses is boring. It isn't actually too terribly paced; it flows well enough, I'd say; but it still doesn't move all that fast, and, to be frank, the premise is really, really stupid. At the very least, there is a slightly better B-plot of Topps hooking up with an old romantic partner to the chagrin of Cera that is bolstered by a more interesting premise, but it is bogged down by a fatal flaw, one shared by the first plot that ultimately brings the story down from boring and dumb to outright intolerable: the characters.



Almost every returning character in the movie comes off as a lot nastier and a lot stupider than usual. Cera is the prime example - she physically assaults characters like Ducky and Petrie over slights and even brattier and mean than her typical Grosvenorian self - but Littlefoot's other friends don't fare too much better; Ducky, Petrie and Spike are stupid/at best naive enough to think that the valleydwellers wouldn't crush the tiny longnecks if they tell them where they are and at least two scenes are dedicated to the kids shunning Littlefoot for being honest about the lie that set up the plot and said kids verbally slamming each other for shunning Littlefoot. Even Littlefoot's grandparents, though typically exceptions throughout the movie, have at least one moment of belittling Littlefoot for being smaller than usual - speaking of, though he is frankly kind of annoying - him suddenly being insecure about being small when that has never been an issue before now, him pinning blame on something that was his fault on tiny animals before a crowd of giant, unhinged dinosaurs (more on them later) and him randomly denying that he was at the tree he messed up when he finally confronts the tiny longnecks are weird - I will at least concede that he isn't the one-note bland always nice Littlefoot that has permeated almost all of the sequels before now. The worst of both worlds comes in the form of the Great Valley's anonymous citizens: simultaneously disturbingly bloodthirsty and barely any more sentient than the sharpteeth that graced the last movie.

The B-plot revolves around three characters: the aforementioned Cera, Daddy Topps and the new character of Tria. Getting Tria out of the way first, she's nice, willing to speak her mind and probably the most likable character in the movie (suspicions over what happened to Mama Topps aside...), but she still isn't very interesting. Though I can't stand how Cera is portrayed for the most part, they, at the very least, provide some rationale behind her behavior in that she is frustrated by Tria entering Topps' life. One line from Littlefoot over her being her new mother provokes a reaction from her, which is definitely interesting, but her reasoning given to her father - to paraphrase, "I liked things better when you liked nobody and nobody liked you" - comes off more that she is mad that she is allowing Topps to develop as a character more than anything. Speaking of, Topps is, surpisingly for a movie bent on making characters meaner and stupider, actually a little bit more noble than usual: he starts off just wanting to let the Great Valley have their holiday in peace, he wants to let his new partner have the first serving of food during the celebration and, when those plans are ruined, he takes it upon himself to both exact (decidedly misplaced) justice on those who (supposedly) ruined everything and protect the valley from the (again, supposed) threats. Of course, the fact that he is on edge over tiny sauropods is still a problem, and he's still old Maddy Topps, so he's still not great or really sensible or anything...

The titular Tinysaurus are small, squeaky and forgettable, barring Big Daddy, who has a nice voice and a memorably strange design but is otherwise also pretty forgettable. As for the Deinonychus duo that are in there to provide a cheap, ineffective thrill: they're dopey, worthless, and just as phoned-in as the III raptors, more fodder for the Old Jerks and Lame Villains Retirement Home™ and more proof that V meant nothing in the grand scheme of things. The first song 'Creepy Crawlies', is terrible, its reprise is terrible, 'Girls and Dads' is mediocre but has fun instrumentals and a bad-but-great-by-me message, 'If Only' is vocally and lyrically weak with a good message about learning from mistakes and 'Stupid Stompers' is horrible.



The animation, I would say, continues the downward spiral from last time, and this step down is a pretty sharp one. The movements are like if you crossed the fluidity of X with the jankiness of II, and the animation in general is exponentially more cartoony than last time, and not in a good way - this is most egregious in the climax with the sharpteeth, which is soiled by the characters turning into gelatinous cartoon monstrosities that look like they crawled out of a Nickelodeon cartoon. The art has taken a hit as well; characters' expressions are a whole lot more exaggerated and rubbery, the backgrounds aren't as strong as last time and some of the art looks outright traced from other points in the series; seriously, look at this and tell me it doesn't look just a little bit familiar.



All in all, this was another real stinker; the third 2.5/10 in a row. If the adults decided to drop a rock on this movie, I wouldn't particularly care. Nor would I care if Tria secretly poisoned the movie decades after I hooked up with it and waited a few years to come back into my life.

• The music that opens the movie is weirdly beautiful; it sounds like it came out of the town level from Jurassic Park: Trespasser.
• Dinosaurs the size of kittens were probably a lot more common than the big ones, we just don't have too many fossils of them yet.
• "Small things can be very important. The dinosaurs of the Great Valley knew that." Not yet, they don't.
• "Flying pointy-bottomed stinger"; is that a Petrie-ism or a verbose general dinosaur-ism?
• At least Topps has a proper motivation; this is HIS tree and he will DIE for it
• Cera has finally regressed to the point where she sees Littlefoot not being an adult as something to bully him over.
• Littlefoot, if you've stayed this small for all of this time, you're probably never going to grow up, get over it.
  
  Though, I have to say, he looks exponentially smaller than in the last movie (which is canon, Grandma brings up Bron); maybe he's shrinking.
• Littlefoot is insecure about his size because Cera is one-dimensional so he de-flowers a tree and sees a bunch of miniature neosauropods
• There are still some vines on the tree for everyone to enjoy, Topps, they're nice and sweet too.
  
  I get that Cera doesn't like seeing her father in this position, but holy hell, get a grip.
• the valleydwellers collectively have one braincell - only Grandpa understands the worth of little things, even Grandma is against him
• This is a good point of reference for gauging the valleydwellers' intelligence; if they were to be thrust back into the Great Beyond, they would all die within days and would probably be fodder for Red Claw - yes, even Red Claw.
  
  Also, good continuity; a Styracosaurus walks past a root and gets ready to go past one side of a tree, and in the very next shot he is underneath the root he just walked past and gets himself stuck.
• Littlefoot sets Cera off by mentioning that Tria could be her "new mom"; so, something happened to Mama Topps, and she didn't die on the way to the Great Valley... and there was a pink threehorn looking at her funny at the end of the first movie... The case doesn't look that good for Tria.
• There's a good idea here with Topps getting a new partner and Cera feeling alienated, but I don't think they're executing it well; Tria isn't all that interesting, Topps is suddenly a completely different character and Cera is unlikable.
  
  Tria just migrated her after the cold time - alright, that's a hiccup in the theory of her having blood on her horns, but she could have been hiding in the shadows until now, and she could have lied when she told Topps how she came here...
  
  Littlefoot's screams sound ridiculously unenthused.
• wouldn't it have been something else if Littlefoot developed a god complex when he met the tiny longnecks?
• Ducky uttering the word "Topsy" is enough to make Cera threaten to kill her - Christ, the threehorn has reached a new low.
• Is it just me, or is everyone really spiteful towards each other in this movie?
• Remember when Petrie was half Ducky's size in the first movie? Now he's big enough to offer rides to small sauropods.
• this is beautiful contrast to Littlefoot worshipping his deadbeat dad in the last movie; a song demeaning one-note jerk dads!
• "Just because they're bigger, they think that makes them more important, and sometimes they for get about the little details. Like us." Big Daddy single-handedly trashes the opening narration.
• I'm going to wager that the tinysaur burrow is barren, given that they're clearly dependent on the kids for food - they must have been nocturnal foragers before the treesweet tree incident.
• Apparently guard duty is necessary for a few single-digit-pound longnecks that the valleydwellers only know to eat plants.
• Topps sees the aforementioned single-digit-pound longnecks as potential threats to a ten-ton Triceratops cow.
• And they're clearly capable of speaking English, but Topps acts like they're sharpteeth; are treesweets that big a deal to these freaks??
• "Savages, savages, barely even ornithodiran!"
• I appreciate that the newer movies have more original scores; they're not as intrusive as horribly-misused Horner music and they tend to sound good.
• Littlefoot is getting smaller, Grandpa outright confirms it; it's been because he's been holding onto little things like lies and has lost his way.
• The kids are mad at him because he messed up the tree and befriended the tiny longnecks and made the grownups push a rock on them (even though they didn't...); I kind of like the dumb joke of Spike eating all of Petrie's best treestars, though.
• Tria only likes the tinysaurs because they're cute, very deep.
  
  Topps wasn't always so mean... care to elaborate, Tria?
• Tickling, the ultimate way to defeat a sharptooth; Tria, you're a Triceratops, you could kill both of these clowns with no effort, especially with Topps by your side.
• The purple one should have died from Topps ramming it like that - I'll give these things credit for being insanely resilient, but that's all the credit I can give them.
• "Why don't you pick on somebody your own size?" -Big Daddy, immediately before picking on some creatures a hundred times their own size and having his children nibble them like the compies did Dieter Stark
• I'd flee too if I saw all of those giant, potentially dangerous herbivores barging towards me.
• Alright, the sharpteeth aren't going to come back, but where are the tiny longnecks going to live now?
• Who let those two rainbowface-colored fastbiters into the Great Valley?

The next movie is the last stop before the main event, let's hope that the streak of awfulness will be broken there.