And, for Some Reason, Aliens

There comes a point in any long running series – not just television but books and movies, games, and anything else you can think of – where the initial ideas that made the series good have vanished, used up and dissipated by the constant need to crank out more and more content. Generally this is referred to as the “jump the shark” moment, the point where the series had gotten too silly, weird, or dumb and is no longer what you remember. While you could honestly argue that the “jump the shark” moment (named, as I’m sure you know, for the Happy Days episode where “cool guy” Fonzie literally water ski jumps over a shark) came when a sequel, The Great Valley Adventure, was made for The Land Before Time, but if that doesn’t count then this seventh film absolutely does.

I went into this film with the resolve to let go of any expectation. We all know nothing is going to change in these films and continuity doesn’t matter. Characters introduced in one film (such as Cera’s niece and nephew) will disappear, never to be seen nor heard from again, and that’s just the way it is. The dinosaurs are going to remain the same age, forever, and these films will be watchable in any order because nothing changes. It’s a never-ending cycle of the kids going out, having adventures, and coming back home as if nothing happened. That’s the way it is.

And yet, this time, in The Land Before Time VII: The Stone of Cold Fire, something was different. Suddenly the kids were talking about how they constantly get sent out on adventures. People were talking about how they were heroes, how they always seem to fix the problems the Great Valley is having, how they’re such brave little kids. People are acknowledging that, yes, these kids are having adventures and, also, that there is some kind of continuity in the films. I was shocked, surprised in a way I didn’t think these films could manage. Good on them for realizing that this is a film series and things should continue from one film to the next. I was impressed.

That wasn’t the “jump the shark” moment, though. No, that came right near the end when, after actually generating some level of good will from me, then the film had to ruin it. After an adventure that sent the kids out on a space rock to prove that a meter did fall to the ground but, no, it wasn’t magical (because, for some reason, everyone in the Great Valley was suddenly superstitious in a way we hadn’t seen before), we learn that, suddenly, aliens exist. Yes, extraterrestrials. Creatures from another planet. Actual, sci-fi aliens.

This is where my brain broke. Honestly, I get these films are for kids and I’m easily three-and-a-half decades older than anyone watching is supposed to be. My morbid curiosity caught me and now I’m stuck in it, forced to make my way through all of these because I have no other course of action. But still, aliens? Nothing in these films at this point has allowed for such a break in the internal reality of the series. Motherfucking aliens. In a Land Before Time film. It’s like an alien coming down to Happy Days and introducing themselves to… Oh, right, that happened as well. Man, what the fuck was up with Happy Days?

I allow a certain amount of latitude with these films, mind you. I understand that dinosaurs didn’t really talk, nor did they sing and dance, which are all creative liberties the series has taken in an effort to tell stories set in this world. That’s fine. But we also recognize that otherwise, these dinosaurs function like dinosaurs. There are meat eaters and there are plant eaters. They don’t have advanced science or civilization, they aren’t discussing breaking the atom or exploring a microscopic world. They’re dinosaurs and they exist within the expected reality of prehistoric Earth. That’s the internal reality of this film series, so that’s how stories should exist within it.

If the films wanted to go off from the start and tell weird tales with unrealistic dinosaurs, that’s fine. I have no problem with that. We’ve had plenty of shows that cover those kinds of stories, from Jim Henson’s Dinosaurs, to Dinosaucers, the Dinobots in Transformers… I could make a whole list. Those all exist within their own version of reality and they’re internally consistent. If any of those shows wanted to introduce aliens that would be fine because that works within the scope of their reality. But it doesn’t work here, not in this film series that, for all its talking and singing and dancing, has been set in a pretty darn grounded reality otherwise. I just… this was it. This was my breaking point.

If we somehow ignore that, which means ignoring the whole plot, really, there’s other issues with this film as well. The animation is, quite frankly, getting pretty shoddy. The films are relying, more and more, on 3D animated backgrounds for key scenes, and these sections have not aged well. Pairing the hand-drawn (which probably wasn’t actually hand-drawn, but still) animated creatures with crappily designed 3D backgrounds makes both look bad. We were already trending down with the art style anyway, as the gorgeous painterly backgrounds of the first film have steadily become less artistically rendered and more cartoony.

At the same time, the transfer quality of the film itself is really bad. These movies were clearly done in standard definition, 480p at best, and now, on larger, 4K televisions, the quality of the work just looks bad. The formerly crisp lines for the characters are now rough and pixelated, blown out by the transfer to DVD and the upscaling to watch them now. There are no Blu-Ray transfers of anything beyond the first film, and I’m guessing that’s because these later films were made on a computer, shoved out at 480p, and then the original work was deleted or destroyed. This is what exists now is all we’re gonna get past the first film, and it’s looking really rough.

About the only thing this film does moderately well is that its songs are at least not annoying anymore. The kid voice actors they’ve got at this point actually can sing, unlike in past films where at least one of them was always gratingly off-key. I wouldn’t say the lyrics were good this time around, but they weren’t so bad that I felt my eyes rolling into the back of my head, which we often got in the previous films. There was no need to add singing and dancing to these films, and even now, with songs that aren’t terrible, I still groan any time one comes on, but at least it’s more bearable than it has been.

So yes, this is a budget film with a bad story and cheap animation. As the series has gone on the quality on all fronts has gone down but I certainly didn’t expect it to get this bad this fast. And yet here we are, seven films in, and I’m really struggling with it on all fronts. These films are getting to the point where I just don’t know why anyone would want to keep watching. If someone told me, “this series only had seven films,” I would look at this film and say, “yep, that tracks.” Except, this wasn’t the last one. There are seven more of these, and I can feel my brain trying to escape my skull at the thought of watching the rest of them. This is, quite honestly, no longer fun.