There wasn't a movie to tie into Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, so I think the chances of there being one tie tie into Dominion are very low at best.

I personally think that Journey of the Brave was just a one-off thing made to piggyback Universal's other dinosaur movie from that time, and that they didn't/still don't have any plans of following up on it in any way.

Whether or not its existence is plausible - I'm pretty firmly in the camp that believes that mokele-mbembe doesn't exist - I have to say that the basic idea behind the thing; sauropods having survived the K/Pg event and managing to hold on by a single species in the belly of the modern-day Congo Basin; is tantalizing, and a good premise for a story.

Does no one care about this guy. That's sad.

Archie will always have a tiny place in my heart, at least; he might not be the highlight of his movie, but he's still pretty cool.



1.) Never. Not in a million years.

2.) What I said above is a good summation of what I think of him; he isn't super deep or interesting (his existence brings up the question of what a sea turtle is doing in a mountain cave but that's a question for another time), but he's a cool old guy with a great voice and some fun lines.

As much as I want to say that my love of dinosaurs - and prehistoric life in general - was jumpstarted by The Land Before Time or Jurassic Park or Walking with Dinosaurs, to do so would be dishonest.

There are humble beginnings, and there are horrid beginnings.



Not that I cared at the time, I was young and I ate him up; that aside, I believe my first exposure to semi-presentable dinosaurs was through the Imaginext line of dinosaur toys from the early 2000's.

I don't see much issue with Mrs. Maia either, for the same reasons others have brought up here; if I were in her shoes in her introductory scene in VI, I probably wouldn't have responded to Ducky's little stunt any more kindly.

I don't think there's much to say about her that hasn't already been said; for as little screen time as she gets, she stands as one of the most memorable characters in the movie and one of the strongest in the whole series. 

1.) This is an odd case; not only do I not remember crying at the scene of her dying when I first watched it, but I straight-up don't remember the scene from any of my viewings of the movie from when I was little; I definitely pay attention to it whenever I watch the movie now, but still, weird...

2.) The fact that I took a good minute to pause and savor her being mentioned in some capacity in the opening narration of JotB when Universal released the first ten minutes of the movie definitely says something about my stance on this matter; absolutely.

I've ranked the sequels a bunch of times over in other threads, so I'll do something a little different here and A.) adapt the movies' scores to fit the scale  and B.) exaggerate them a little bit for variety's sake: (e.g. I don't think the 5.5/10 scores I've given TTOTGG and GDOTF reflect the fact that I think they're some of the stronger sequels very well)

The Great Valley Adventure: 2

The Time of the Great Giving: 4

Journey Through the Mists: 5

The Mysterious Island: 2

The Secret of Saurus Rock: 1

The Stone of Cold Fire: 4

The Big Freeze: 3

Journey to Big Water: 1

The Great Longneck Migration: 0

Invasion of the Tinysauruses: 0

The Great Day of the Flyers: 4

The Wisdom of Friends: 0

Journey of the Brave: 3

A friend showed me a few episodes of Dink a couple years back; though I can't go off of what I said on it at the time (thank you, Fandom, for completely levelling my message wall ), what I can say is that I was pretty thoroughly appalled by both of the episodes I watched (one with a character being ostracized by the dinosaur civilians of the Great Value Great Valley and the other, which put me off of watching anything else from the show, about Scat - who, I have to say, I absolutely detested by the end of the episode, the first thing I did after watching it was draw him being eaten - harassing an Iguanodon thing because... I don't plainly remember, something to do with fruits).

The thing that stuck out to me most when watching both episodes, besides the cheap animation and how much of a shameless ripoff of The Land Before Time it came off as, was the sound design - even in the first of the episodes I watched, which had a decently dark tone and wasn't really comedic in anyway, it was laced with ultra-cartoony, zany sound effects that massively detracted from the piece.

What I think is most interesting in the show is less related to how it plagiarized the original LBT movie and how later LBT media may or may not have drawn influence from the show. To give an example: not long after I was shown those two episodes, another user on the site started watching the episodes and took a liking to them, and started posting screenshots and audio clips; though, again, I don't have the original posts on hand anymore because of the site trashing itself, he once pointed out to me that one of the episodes involved the characters playing a game involving running on a log and trying not to fall off, well before 'The Great Log-Running Game' from the TV series was a thing. An eye for an eye, I guess 

 

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I want to preface by saying that this is not the worst thing I've ever seen. I'm inclined to say that I've seen worse - Ice Age: Collision Course, a few episodes of Jurassic Fight Club, Clash of the Dinosaurs as a whole, Dingo Pictures' PlayStation 2 classic Dinosaur Adventure - but that doesn't mean that this isn't a frothing pile of Apatosaurus feces.



I'm going to start off by giving a list of the things I liked, or at least didn't strongly dislike:

• Two of the songs aren't actually bad: "Yellow Belly Bounce" is catchy with a nice beat and instrumentals and "How Do You Know?", though it has weak lyrics and is generally forgettable, at least sounds nice and has decent-enough messages of listening to your gut and understanding that not everyone sees the world in the same way as you do (that are bogged down by how the movie itself handles these messages).
• The very opening of Grandma narrowly avoiding death and Littlefoot having a nightmare over what could have happened is actually pretty decent, and a strong way to set up the story.
• The animation and art are generally not terrible - they dip into TV series quality every once in a while, but it's generally only a little worse than in XII, and there are ever-so-brief moments where the animation quality and fluidity soar.
• One joke: Cera baiting Littlefoot into listening to her, all while she has this weird seductive look on her face, and screaming "don't ever wake me up again!". Littlefoot's response to this is particularly priceless

Alright, positives out of the way, let's get to the story.



Alright, stop me if you've heard this one before: the main characters are thrust into a situation where A.) they must find a valley filled with food where they are stalked by sharpteeth that are seemingly but not actually dead, B.) where they go past a rock that looks like a certain species, C.) have a false alarm where they think they've found the valley before the "valley" is ruthlessly devoured and they realize it isn't the valley, D.) they end up in a dangerous situation where their group is split up and E.) they defeat the sharpteeth once and for all by forcing them off of a cliff before they find the valley. Because you have probably picked up on what the plot is copying by now, I will not even elaborate because I trust you, the reader, much more than those behind this movie trusted their audience. The new elements are generally very poor; in particular, the attempts at working the idea of "wisdoms" (survival knowledge passed from a guardian to a child) into the story are clumsy and irritating and, past the above example, the comedy ranges from ineffective to downright noxious. Even a could-have-been decent message is undermined by the characters that are used to convey it (they'll be described further down) being, er, the way they are; and, well, the less said about the sharptooth scenes, the better, more on them later as well. The song 'Say So' is on par with 'Imaginary Friend' in terms of sheer dreadfulness.



Most of the returning characters, including all of the members of Littlefoot's posse but the longneck himself, are their typical one-dimensional Grosvenor selves (even though this isn't a Grosvenor TLBT movie, their characterizations regrettably live on), though run through a mild stupidity filter. However, Littlefoot himself is an exception: on edge after nearly killing his grandmother, his main role in the movie is to spew "wisdoms" at other characters and patronize a flock of creatures that have existed without him just fine, which is annoying and frankly kind of frustrating. However, much more oddly and disturbingly is how his attitude during the two sharptooth scenes; in the first instance, he and his friends incapacitate them by burying them alive with rocks without giving them any chance to escape, and, after their threat to him, his friends and his pastel leeches has been nullified, he keeps crushing them under rocks before running off once they have been completely buried. Though this is something by itself, the climax offers a much better look at his feelings towards sharpteeth in this movie; after forcing the sharpteeth, who were reduced to quivering, terrified shells of themselves before the fact, off of a cliff with his new legion of abominations, instead of simply turning around and checking on everyone, he looks down and makes a joke about their deaths: "what do you know? They're still in a group!" Seeing Littlefoot being so callous after all of these sequels; especially towards creatures that are just animals at the end of the day, and especially if you still think that V's forgotten efforts to humanize sharpteeth hold water; is extremely off-putting, and makes it even harder to like him than just him being annoying did.

I don't think there's anything to say about the yellowbellies that hasn't been said before: they're very, very annoying, they make obnoxious noises, they have unappealing and inaccurate designs (they're supposed to be Beipiaosaurus but they look like bloated dodos with hands) and they aren't funny in any way. They don't even get being stupid right; at least 70% of their "stupidity" is just them forgetting things and failing to pay attention to things being said right in front of their bulbous faces. Foobie is probably the most tolerable of all of them and Doofah is effortlessly the worst character in the entire franchise. At the very least, I will admit that I see some of their appeal, especially thanks to their song - they are beings of pure hedonism that live their whole lives dancing, singing, sleeping and eating that don't ever bother to think of the future - not that I think that they're redeemable myself, but I see where some can like them.

If not for the reasons mentioned above while describing Littlefoot, the sharpteeth would be no more or less remarkable than the Tyrannosaurus trio from X or the raptors from XI; they're slow, they're stupid and they're generally lame. The only way they stand out among the rest is that, because of the aforementioned reasons, they are sympathetic, and easily the most empathetic characters in the movie - heck, I have a hunch that even the animators/artists thought this way, with some of the expressions they gave the poor things. (Fig. A, Fig. B and Fig. C - why yes, the image titles are alluding to pet names I've given the things)



Speaking of the art and animation, though I have said before that it isn't particularly bad, it is yet another downgrade from the previous movie. The animation looks like a hybrid between XII and some of the more competently-animated episodes of the TV series; it's riddled with coloring errors and movements are choppier and a little jankier than last time. The art is also a bit of a downgrade; the colors are duller than usual, the backgrounds are either TV series-looking Great Valley scenery or boring, bland deserts and none of the new designs look good - the sharpteeth in particular look like animated versions of the "Baryonyx" that grace Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (given that this movie came out almost 11 years before that movie, maybe the barys there are supposed to be hyper-realistic renditions of the ones here... hmmm).



A lot of people say that this is the worst of the Land Before Time sequels, and I wholeheartedly agree. Though I don't think it's as completely bottom-of-the-barrel-of-media bad as I made it out to be the last couple times I watched it, I still don't think it deserves anything higher than a 1.5/10.

The next movie is a spinoff of the TV series that was made to cash in on Jurassic World years after the series ended with a whimper, great...

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• have a dumb theory that I made up in a few minutes without much rhyme or reason: TWoF takes place after the TV series, Red Claw was defeated offscreen (either in an epic battle that was too good for the crappy show or by hunger after being abandoned by Screech and Thud), Chomper and Ruby have returned to the Mysterious Beyond and everyone has gotten even flatter and more stale. I know that makes Journey of the Brave take place before this movie, bear with me.
  
  Either way, come on come on and dance.
• Meanwhile, in eastern Russia...
• Cera sounds a little different; higher-pitched and a little more nasally.
• apparently climbing things is a problem when you're a threehorn; are Dana and Dinah canon?
• This series is founded in the school of disobeying your parents, but here we have an entire movie of espousing the opposite mindset.
• the buildup to Loofah is a lot swifter than Guido's buildup was, but the creatures that are built up are infinitely more sinister in this case.
• Yellowberries are obligate frugivores and have negative-digit IQs.
• Well, the yellowbellies sure are good at... uh... moving.
• Loofah and Doofah had to have turned around after they climbed up to this plateau, so that joke's burnt. (context: them mistaking the Great Valley for the Mysterious Beyond - they had to have climbed in the direction facing the Mysterious Beyond after climbing their little plateau from the Great Valley, so they had to have turned back in the direction they just came from to look back at the Great Valley so they could mistake it for the Mysterious Beyond)
• being taught things and learning in general is an alien concept to yellowbellies
• mental warfare: give the yellowbellies instructions on how to breathe, let them start suffocating when they forget them and leave them to die from oxygen deprivation
• The true heroes of the movie enter the picture through Loofah's stupidity.
• You know, it's really barren out here; are the drought conditions returning?
• I want to say that they're not even bothering to run, but holy hell, (the sharpteeth are) incapacitated to the point where they can't even escape!
• and, when they are absolutely no threat, Littlefoot completely buries them alive to the sound of "WOW! HE DID THE HEROIC DEED!" music.
• disguising yourself as a bush should not be anything resembling a good survival strategy; unless you smell like a bush, anyway, maybe the yellowbellies smell like bushes.
• Spike bonding with Foobie is weirdly sweet; now that I think about it, was the rationale behind introducing the yellowbellies just to have characters that are generally stupider than Spike?
• "The yellowbellies got along just fine before they met us." Cera absolutely trashes the plot of the entire movie; in a perfect world, the movie ends there.
• This is the second time they've used that one specific audio clip of Doofah saying "Stay in a group. Sounds like fun!"
• Maybe the yellowbellies would have been less annoying if they were way more basal tetrapods and were to the dinosaurs what cattle or other livestock are to people - I say this as the kids wrangle the yellowbellies.
• The world definitely seems way more barren than usual; of all of the Grosvenor-and-onward sequels to respect the apocalyptic conditions of the original movie...
• The most advanced plants that exist out here are weeds and short grasses.
• they reuse stock tree/mountain backgrounds from the TV series/the Great Valley earlier in the movie; it's sparse enough tree cover to not really deflate the drought idea
• Understanding that different people perceive everything in different ways isn't a bad message, but maybe they shouldn't have conveyed the new world Littlefoot is being shown with a bunch of complete boofballs.
• Someone got paid to smear this weird, terrible-looking dot effect all over these otherwise-passable backgrounds.
• Real talk: with how slow the yellowbellies are, it's astounding that (the sharpteeth) can't catch them.
• These are regular post-art shift trashy lame sharpteeth (refer to Waalek (err, this wonderful fellow  ) letting Littlefoot run under his legs), but they're easy to root for because of how the protagonists are portrayed.
• Berry Valley was RIGHT OVER THERE
  
  edit: It looks tiny; a fraction the size of the Great Valley; apparently one having Spike-tier intelligence is makes them worthy of being the Wise One.
• There's a yellowbelly in the background with a thick, goofy British accent going "Oh-ho! It's berry time! Berry time! Ooooohh!"
• yes, leave them, I hope the door doesn't slam them on the way out... I hope the Indominus Rex charges in and slaughters the lot of them instead
• No, Littlefoot, they didn't have wisdoms; they had dumdoms.
• Ducky admits that she and the others have trouble staying in the Great Valley; yeah, they're never going to improve on that.

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Well, that sure was a thing.

With how I chose to describe Journey of the Brave at the end of the review, I'll leave you to decide whether or not I'm going to be keen on it - regardless, there's one movie left to cover and one review left to mirror here. Stay tuned.

This is a bit of a hard topic for me to really put into words, so I'll be succinct; looking at a few select instances of the kids' interactions with sharpteeth (specifically XIII, which has been mentioned here already; poor  ), I think it's pretty easy (and fun) to paint the darned little ornithodirans in a less-than-flattering light.

1.) I adore the idea that all of the incidents of the kids leading sharpteeth into harm's way/to their deaths have culminated in them being seen by the Mysterious Beyond's resident carnivores as indomitable, grim reaper-like figures that only the bravest, stupidest and most unwitting sharpteeth are unfortunate enough to try and hunt.

2.) Aside from the obvious example of Littlefoot's rage over his mother's death leading him and his friends to assassinate Sharptooth, I think the easiest non-XIII example to bring up is less an example of them doing something and more an example of how they respond to the actions of others: after the sharpteeth in VI are dispatched; right off of the heels of V, their immediate reaction to witnessing the slaughter of creatures they just learned are apparently intellectually equal to themselves is to cheer uproariously.