Two Long Necks are Not Better than One

And so we continue on with the stories of five dinosaurs effectively frozen in amber. I don’t mean it to sound harsh, but it is pretty clear that nothing can really change in The Land Before Time. If a problem comes up in the first act, expect it to get resolved by the time the credits roll, even if it’s a problem that would seem like it would change something key about the world of the characters. If some new person is introduced, expect them to leave the story by the end of the third act. Nothing can really change because, if it did, then the little kids watching these willy-nilly in any order wouldn’t be able to keep track.

Thus the comment about the dinosaurs being stuck in amber (maybe better by the fact that they’re dinosaurs which just lets us all remember Jurassic Park instead). Nothing can change, and nothing really will, which leads to these films feeling less like films and more like episodes of a television show (which is even more apt when you realize that there actually is a TV series set in the same universe, which occurs between movies 13 and 14). You can watch the episodes in any order and you never have to worry about the characters leaving or dying or the setting changing because then your comfort food wouldn’t be as comforting. And that’s what these films are: comfort food for little kids.

Now, I don’t think we’re quite deep enough in the series that we really have to start questioning who these films are for. The original The Land Before Time came out in 1988 and this four-quel hails from 1996. That’s an eight year difference so if you were, say, six-years-old when the original was in theaters you’d be fourteen when this film came out. At that point I’m sure you’d already aged out of the series, but maybe you had a kid sibling that watched the films with you when you were growing up and, thus, could have still wanted to see further adventures. It’s a hypothetical I mention because I don’t think the story of this film would really work for the fourteen year olds in the audience. I think these only really work if the kids are tiny tots and don’t think too hard about the stories.

This fourth film introduces us to a new problem: Littlefoot’s grandfather (Kenneth Mars) is dying. He caught some weird, rare condition (that the film doesn’t explain at all because little kids wouldn’t understand anyway) and there’s only one way to cure him, apparently. A visiting band of long-necks, led by the Old One (Carol Bruce), make mention of how, in the distant lands beyond the Great Valley there are nightflowers that can cure this condition. They’re seen it before, and it’s the only cure they know of.

Naturally, while the adults debate the merits of going out in the Mists Beyond and exploring the world that’s changing beyond the walls of the Great Valley (implying that the age of the dinosaurs is ending), Littlefoot (now voiced by Scott McAfee) decides he has to go and get these flowers. While he thinks about inviting his friends to go with him – Candace Hutson as Cera, Heather Hogan as Ducky, Rob Paulsen as Spike, Jeff Bennett as Petrie – instead he turns to visiting little long-neck Ali (Juliana Hansen) since she says she knows where the flowers grow… and also because she’s afraid of all his friends. But when trouble occurs in the great mists, and Littlefoot gets stuck, Ali has to get past her fear and grab his friends or they may never see Littlefoot again.

So let’s start with the part of the plot I liked the least: grandpa’s sickness. I thought, when grandpa keeled over, that we might actually get a lesson in death and grief. It’s a bold move to have an old dinosaur get sick in a movie aimed for kids, but at the very least I figure if they’re going to do it they’re going to stick to it. Sure, that goes against what I said above, how these films are frozen in amber and change can’t happen, but they decided to bring it up so that means we’re going somewhere with it, right?

Nope. Even though we’re introduced to “grandpa’s first stroke” (not what it’s called in the movie, just what my wife and I called it while watching the film), the movie quickly backtracks and comes up with an easy solution to cure him of, you know, debilitating death. Grandma (Linda Gary) sings a song about the “Circle of Life”, Littlefoot is taught about mourning, but then the flower becomes the quest and any question about if grandpa dino is gonna live or not is thrown out the window because, hey, there’s an easy cure.

I think this is actually a truly detrimental storyline to raise in this film. Each movie (starting with The Land Before Time II: The Great Valley Adventure) has had a lesson to teach kids, a moral to tell. This lesson appears to be, “if you wish hard enough, and find a magical flower, you can defeat death.” So what are little kids going to do when their own grandfather keels over from a stroke, or a heart attack, or who knows what? Hope and pray for a magical nightflower because Littlefoot and his friends found one and it made their grandfather all better? Maybe. Certainly it introduces its story and they cheats to get around it which isn’t just bad storytelling it’s also a bad thing to teach little kids.

And then we have Ali, who sucks. Ali essentially takes Cera’s role as “Queen Bigot”. She doesn’t like Littlefoot’s friends because they aren’t long-necks and, apparently, she’s been raised to only be around long-necks. You know, like how Cera only wanted to be around three-horns until she became friends with the group and, eventually, stopped being a Neo-Nazi. It’s the same plotline, made even dumber by the fact that now, in this film Cera says, “hey, she should be more accepting of others!” Pot, meet kettle.

This leads to a really dumb storyline where Ali keeps rejecting the friends, even when she and Littlefoot need their help, and then Cera gets mad because Ali is being a bigot despite the fact that this was Cera’s defining character trait for the first two films. It’s not, “how can we help Ali realize, like I did, that all species should be respected?” Instead it’s, “that girl is a bigot and we should hate her back.” And while, in this heightened political climate of 2025 I do think a certain amount of Nazi hate is fine, that’s not really the exact message the film was going for here. Cera should have been more accepting, and Ali just shouldn’t be a retread character. It doesn’t work.

Although, really, nothing works in this film. The voice acting is fine, and the animation is on par with the previous two direct-to-video films, but otherwise this is a very disposable, throwaway bit of The Land Before Time trash. It doesn’t have much point to it, the lessons it teaches are either half baked or are retreads of stuff we’ve seen before in this very series. And in the end it all amounts to, once again, a big reset so that the characters can go back to being frozen in amber for another round of adventures. It’s just all so utterly pointless.

I get these are direct-to video films for little kids and I can’t have expectations for them at the same level of theatrical releases. Sure. But these are meant to be pieces of entertainment and this particular film was badly written and not entertaining. It commits the worst sin a film can make: it’s boring. Give me weird and bad and goofy as all hell, and if it’s bad at least it’s watchable. This film isn’t good, like the first movie, but it’s also not enjoyably bad. It’s just boring and empty, which makes it so much worse.