A Lesson About Family

The last few movies in the Land Before Time series have defeated me. I’ve given up trying to worry about continuity, about growth for characters, about expecting these films to do anything good with character building or world building or anything like that. These aren’t those kinds of films. They’re going to have as much continuity to them as a Looney Tunes cartoon. They exist to give kids mildly engaging adventures that they can watch, forget about, and move on from without parents worrying that their wee ones will see anything objectionable. They’re preschool entertainment and nothing more. A sad fall after The Land Before Time gave us an engaging and well crafted family adventure, but this is where we’re at now.

I mean, the seventh film, The Stone of Cold Fire, was such an abomination of a film, introducing aliens into what, up to that point, was a relatively grounded adventure series about dinosaurs that we all just have to collectively accept that nothing matters and anything goes in these films. And I’m not going to say that the eighth film, The Big Freeze, doesn’t have the same flaws. This is a film about the dinosaurs of the Great Valley suddenly experiencing a deep and unabiding winter when, by all accounts, they should have all frozen to death. Magical solutions let them live, and we’re not supposed to think too hard about any of it, but still. These films have long since flown the coop when it comes to realism.

Still, in some regards this film is an improvement not just over the seventh adventure but also over the last few we’ve gotten, The Secret of Saurus Rock and The Mysterious Island included.You want character development? This film has some, focusing on characters that have actually been underserved by previous movies. You want a lesson kids can understand, something they can take away as a moral for the story? They have that too, here. This film doesn’t fix all the flaws of the series, and in fact perpetuates a number of this, but at least in some regards this is a step up over the crap we’ve gotten from the series.

The film finds our standard quintet of kids – Thomas Dekker as Littlefoot, Anndi McAfee as Cera, Aria Curzon as Ducky, Jeff Bennett as Petrie, and Rob Paulsen as Spike, all of them our standard players for these characters – listening to history and “wisdom” from the oldest member of the herd, Mr. Thicknose (Robert Guillaume). The old dinosaur doesn’t have anyone, so he’s wanted to share what he knows with the young ones as a way to bond and feel useful in his old age. It’s a nice thought, but he’s also kind of stubborn and pigheaded, traits that don’t endear him to the kids who would rather wander off, eat, sleep, and play.

Also not endearing themself if Spike, who has been annoying Ducky as only a sibling can. He bothers her enough that Ducky gets mad, and she only gets madder when other spiketails (as part of a wandering herd) come to the Great Valley and Spike decides to go off and hang out with them. Suddenly the family unit they’ve made is breaking apart and Ducky doesn’t know what to do with herself. When snow comes and falls, for the first time ever, in the Great Valley, the spiketails elect to move on and find warmer climates (and more food) elsewhere. They invite Spike to come along and he’s torn but, faced with Ducky’s anger, he decides to move on. But once a bigger storm hits, Ducky starts to worry about her adopted brother, so she heads out into the snow to chase after him and the pack. The other kids, realizing Ducky is missing, decide to follow her, but Mr. Thicknose inserts himself and forces them to take him with them as a chaperone. It’s an adventure out into the cold to find their lost friends and, hopefully, find a way to survive this surprisingly harsh winter.

In one way, The Big Freeze kind of pushes the background story of the series forward. There have been hints that the Great Valley is a weird, rare pocket of paradise on this Earth, that the dinosaurs living there have found a spot that is protected and safe while the rest of the world deals with a cataclysm these dinosaurs are unaware of. Rocks falling from the sky, bugs coming along and eating all the resources, birds and mammals slowly evolving and taking larger parts of the ecology. And now, of course, we get a harsh winter, a surprising season that the Great Valley has never seen before. From a certain reading of these clues we might deduce that the Earth has been struck by the dinosaur-killing meteor and, sooner or later, all the dinosaurs are going to die off, one way or another (a process that some scientists think might have taken up to a million years as the Earth changed into a very different planet from the jungle paradise the dinosaurs were used to).

Not that any of that is directly discussed in the films. Not even the seventh film, which features aliens, actually commented on that, as interesting as that discussion might have been. We can’t worry the kiddies that their dinosaur friends might die off one day, even if that’s realistic. They live in a self-contained paradise. They get to live forever. Don’t worry about meteors, or cataclysmic winter. None of that matters in the Great Valley, where everyone is safe and sound forever.

All that is really besides the point to the main story, which is really about family. Ducky and Spike, despite being two different species, have adopted each other (and the rest of Ducky’s pack) as family. He might be a spiketail, but he’s her brother and she loves him, even when she doesn’t like him. The film wants to show us a lesson about how siblings can be mad at each other, push each other away, and yet still love each other. It’s a good lesson, and it works really well here because, let’s be honest, it finally gives Ducky and Spike things to do.

The films haven’t really known what to do with characters that aren’t Littlefoot or Cera. Ducky and Spike had, for the most part, been comic relief in their tales. They are there to make jokes, say cute things, or eat stuff, all while trouble happens around them. It’s rare that anything important happens because of them or that they learn and grow and share because of events around them. Littlefoot is usually the main character, and if he’s not then Cera steps up to fill that void. It’s actually really nice that Ducky and Spike get things to do in this film, allowing us to explore them as characters in ways they couldn’t before.

Of course, naturally, everything they go through is essentially reset, once more, by the end of the film. Spike might have gone off with the other spiketails for the season, but once the snows hit and they get lost in the white, Ducky saves them and brings them to a warm place the kids have found, a hot springs with plenty of food around it, so that they can all rest for the season and be safe until Spring. Nothing can really change and it never will, so while it was interesting to see Spike wander off with a different herd to learn what it means to be a spiketail, we also had to know it wouldn’t last. The films always find a way to reset us back to zero.

I think the one aspect of this film that really doesn’t work is the character of Mr. Thicknose. He’s supposed to be there, I think, to teach us that we should “respect our elders”. The film, though, doesn’t do a very good job with that lesson. For starters it decides to invest this lesson in a character that hasn’t appeared in any of these films before, so we have no reason to understand why he should be respected other than by grace of the fact that he’s old. Him complaining that the children don’t respect him sounds like a Boomer complaining about how “those darn kids have no respect.” As is always the case, respect has to be earned, and Thicknose doesn’t do much to earn it for a good portion of the film.

It would have been better, really, for that lesson to come from a character we actually do know, like Littlegoot’s grandpa. He’s an older dinosaur that’s been around for a while, and if the film wanted to teach us a lesson about respecting elders, he’s an elder we’d respect. He’s proven himself, across a number of films, that he can be trusted, and it wouldn’t be hard to write a story where some young dinosaur doesn’t respect Grandpa, there’s a bit of a discussion about how that’s rude, and then everyone learns to care and share once more. It would work much better than trying to make Mr. Thicknose into a viable protagonist. Especially since, once again, I’m sure he won’t show up in a future film, unlike Grandpa Longneck.

Plus, please, can we get better music in these films? The songs are especially bad this time around, with tunes clearly played on a Casio keyboard while much of the cast try to warble along to songs that aren’t written for their range. The songs are never great in any of these films, but this time around they’re so bad that I could feel my ears bleed, just a little from the cacophony playing out on screen. The best solution would be to never make the dinosaurs sing and dance, but that ship has already sailed, so at least make it better than this.

The Big Freeze is a flawed movie, make no mistake, but on the grand scale of Land Before Time films, it’s at least one of the better sequels. Yes, it has a number of issues that really should have been corrected, and yes even a good Land Before Time sequel is still bad in comparison to the original. But we take what we can get and, in many ways, this is at least one of the more tolerable films in the series. It could be better, but it also could be much worse.