Island? What Island?

It’s funny that in a film that actually does reference just a little bit of previous continuity, this is also the Land Before Time that proves the hardest the continuity is going to be frozen in amber with no real changes ever allowed. This is a complaint that I’ve had before, through all the previous The Land Before Time sequels (The Great Valley Adventure, The Time of the Great Giving, and Journey Through the Mists) about how the series can never change, can never push its characters, setting, or stories forward because, then, the show wouldn’t work for little kids watching them in any order. But this movie really takes the cake for absolutely refusing to make changes, and it’s beyond aggravating.

The thing about this film that really bothers me is that, even more so than with the fourth (where grandpa was nearly dying but we couldn’t have that so he’s magically cured), the film refuses to commit to change. The movie has a swarm of locusts come and eat all the green food in the Great Valley, so the dinosaurs have to leave. This is an interesting change since it forces the dinosaurs to leave. That leads to a new setting, new characters (somewhat, anyway), and new dangers. But then, by the film’s end, we’re right back to the Great Valley again, because change cannot occur. “Oh, don’t worry, kids. We will never force you to worry about real change because that’s not a lesson we want you to learn.

I’m actually really annoyed by this for more reasons than just the fact that the valley comes back and we reset the setting. It also keeps everyone the same age, size, everything. It’s a whole season, at least, before they can return, and you would think, with a few more months (on top of however many months these films have covered so far) that the kids in the show would grow up at all. That’s basic growth and evolution. If this were a live action show with kids, the kids would be at least a year old, if not much more, and the producers would have to write really new stories for them. But no, the kids here are just as stuck in amber, growth wise, as they are with their stories.

Instead, the film treats us to yet another same old story for the film. After the herd leaves the Great Valley they wander for a bit, almost break up their patchwork herd, and then the kids (Brandon LaCroix as Littlefoot's speaking voice, Thomas Dekker as Littlefoot's singing voice, Anndi McAfee as Cera, Aria Curzon as Ducky, Jeff Bennett as Petrie, and Rob Paulsen as Spike) wander off to find food so that all their families can stay together. You know, because the adults in this film series are ineffectual and can’t keep an eye on their children, while the kids solve every single problem ever.

So the kids go off on their own, making sure to leave a trail for the adults to follow. They reach the coast, right to the ocean (which the kids didn’t understand) and then spot a land of green off along a narrow land bridge. They cross, find all kinds of weird food, and then get stuck there when the land bridge washes out. Now they’re in a world of carnivores out to hunt them, on an island they don’t understand, and they need help. Which they get, in the form of returning character, Chomper (Cannon Young).

There are parts of this film I actually like. I appreciate that the film pushes the characters outside the Great Valley. I’d appreciate it more if it stuck to those guns and didn’t, by the time the credits roll, show the dinosaurs going back to the Valley, which is lush and safe once more. And no, I’m not going to spoiler that. There’s 14 films in this series and every one ends with them resetting back to where they started. If you didn’t expect them to make it back to the Great Valley by the film's end, you haven’t been paying attention.

And then there’s Chomper. He arrives back in this film, after last showing up in the second film. The Great Valley Adventure, and now he’s “grown up” (although still small) and can speak both herbivore and carnivore. For us, this comes out as him speaking English to our hero children while growling and roaring at the adult carnivores. I like this as it’s generally consistent with the “language” we’ve seen from the “sharp teeth” in this series (although not one hundred percent consistent since maybe omnivores and some of the other villain characters in the series also speak English) and it leads to some of the best moments of the series.

Generally speaking the Land Before Time films do not contain humor for adults. These are kid-friendly films, not family-friendly, so the films don’t bother pitching themselves at the older viewers. But for a few, brief moments in this film there’s humor that isn’t simple and kid-friendly. It’s not blue, but it’s certainly not stuff I’d expect the kids to laugh at. We get subtitles any time Chomper talks to his parents, and they are normal, funny adults. They get in a few amusing lines, they don’t talk down to the audience, it’s pretty great. I have a feeling this is because they knew the kids wouldn’t be able to read the subtitles so they threw in some jokes just for the older people in the audience. I very much respected that.

At the same time, the inclusion of Chomper brings with it some continuity problems. He’s allowed to grow up, just a little, which makes sense considering it’s been some months since we last saw him. But the other kids haven’t grown up. They haven’t changed at all. Why is he allowed to become bigger but they can’t? Shouldn’t all of them be growing at the same rate, or very nearly? It’s not like The Simpsons where Bart, Lisa, and little Maggie have all been the same age going on 40 years now. Chomper aged, so everyone should… but they don’t.

It also leads to the film reverting whatever mild character growth Cera made. By the fourth film, Journey Through the Mists, she was getting upset at other people for being closed-minded bigots, but now that they have Chomper back with them, suddenly she’s racist again. Yes, sharp teeth are scary, but they know Chomper and he’s nothing but nice to them when they arrive at his island. But Cera is a hateful meanie the whole course of the film and it doesn’t really make sense. Clearly the writers don’t care if Cera makes any permanent character growth because they’ll revert her any time they need to just to push a weak story forward.

And make no mistake, this is a weak story. The whole adventure can really be summarized as, “kids wander off from their parents, get lost for a bit, and then come home.” Everything that happens on the island remains stuck there. The kids find a bunch of food, but it’s on the island and they leave it behind, never taking their families there. All the food they actually need is found elsewhere, at a place where the kids didn’t bother going, so they actually accomplished very little. You could, reasonably, cut out everything on the island entirely – the island, notably, that is in the very title of the film – and nothing about the resolution of the story would change at all. That’s criminally bad writing.

And for what? To resolve one lingering plot thread from the second film? “Hey, I wonder what happened to Chomper?” said no one ever. Amusing as he is, he’s an inconsequential character on an inconsequential island, all part of an inconsequential story. This film is an hour-thirty of meaningless fluff. And then we go back to the Great Valley. Wow, I’m so glad I watched this.