Back to the Ocean Again

Okay, so maybe the seventh film, The Stone of Cold Fire, was a low point for the Land Before Time series because, honestly, the last two films haven’t been that bad. At least, you know, on a graduated scale for Land Before Time works. None of these sequels have really been good, but some are certainly worse than others, and films eight, The Big Freeze, and nine, Journey to Big Water, have at least been subtle improvements over the previous movies. Again, by degrees, but this deep into the franchise we take what we can get.

We’ll naturally have to acknowledge that all the usual flaws of the series are still present here. The film feels the need to brush aside everything that happens in this film by the end of the adventure, once more resetting us back to neutral in the Great Valley once more. The singing and dancing in the film sucks and the movies would be better without it. And the storytelling is once again shallow and not great, taking the kids on a largely meaningless adventure without weight or substance at all. If you can accept all that and still want to see this film, then you’ll get an above average adventure for this series. Take that as you will.

This film finds the kids – Thomas Dekker as Littlefoot, Anndi McAfee as Cera, Aria Noelle Curzon as Ducky, Jeff Bennett as Petrie, Rob Paulsen as Spike, all of whom are going to remain our cast for the rest of the series outside of different actors stepping in for Littlefoot in every film going forward – exploring the edges of the Great Valley after a massive rain storm causes flooding across the land. Suddenly there’s water everywhere, coming in from waterfalls from the Mysterious Beyond, and this includes new creatures as well.

One such critter, an Ophthalmosaurus named Moe (also Paulsen), befriends Littlefoot. The two have a great day playing together, much to the consternation of Cera who finds herself quite jealous of their bond. But eventually Littlefoot realizes that Moe needs to get back home, back to the Big Water (read: the ocean) that Littlefoot and his friends once explored months before (in The Mysterious Island). So the kids, despite their guardians’ wishes, venture out into the world beyond as they always end up doing, for another grand and heroic adventure. Again.

I won’t deny, I laughed during this film, not because the movie wanted me to but just because a situation in the middle of it was quite silly. The kids go to ask their parents and guardians if they can help take Moe back to the sea, and the adults all say no, so the kids go off and do it anyway. The film is self aware enough to know that these kids are unruly and are going to do whatever they want, but it still has the adults act shocked when the kids venture out on their own on another adventure. Like, this is the ninth time this has happened. At a certain point you would think they’d accept that the kids are heroes cloaked in plot armor and nothing can stop them, ever.

Hell, this time around Petrie is nearly eaten by a Liopleurodon, with his wing literally in its mouth for a second, and then he’s saved by a random log falling on the predator’s head. He should be dead now, a tiny snack for a big dinosaur, but nothing can happen to these kids and they can’t die. Everyone should know this by now, and usually these kids are treated like big damn heroes. Why the adults thought the kids would sit around idly, and that they wouldn’t venture off on their own at the drop of a tree star, I simply do not know.

Outside of that, this was another random, fairly inoffensive adventure for the Land Before Time crew. Much of the film is padding, as you expect, with the kids wandering around aimlessly, performing little tasks of problem solving as random things happen to them time and again. I equate their adventures to dungeon crawling, with their party venturing out, finding little issues they have to resolve, one at a time, before they reach whatever destination they were aiming for. Then the narrator (read: Dungeon Master) says, “and the adventure was a success, with the children returning home once more.” This is every film in the series, not just this one, with a formula as locked in stone as, well, an insect petrified in amber. But then we already know that, so it’s the little things that cause variation that matter.

Our companion this time around is Moe and, to be honest, he’s really annoying. Paulsen’s voice work this time is not great for the character, with a weird, grating trill to all his line deliveries. The character is underwritten, which matters this time around because Moe is in almost every scene. He swims, he jumps, he jokes, and that’s about it. He could be a nameless, voiceless character that the heroic kids had to return to their home and the adventure wouldn’t be any different. Moe, quite frankly, adds nothing to the scenes he’s in.

As an instigator of change for the other characters, though, he’s a little more interesting. Firstly he gets to teach Cera a lesson in jealousy. She doesn’t want to admit she hates Moe simply because Littlefoot has made a new friend, and, as we know from the fourth film, Journey Through the Mists, Cera doesn’t like it when Littlefoot has new friends. In fact, in a way, this film has a similar lesson in that regard as the fourth film, so we can’t really say that Cera learns anything new. She just learns it again.

By that same token, we’ve already been to Big Water once before, back in the fifth film, so this adventure doesn’t feel that fresh or interesting. Moe essentially forces the kids to go to a place they’ve been before, and what this really affirms is that the movies are starting to get a little more comfortable referencing past continuity. “We’ve been to the ocean before. We went there on our own. We know how to get back home.” That’s interesting, and the films using Moe as a way to say, “sure, there’s some limited continuity here,” is at least something.

The most interesting addition we have in this film comes from Petrie. At first everyone thinks Littlefoot is lying about Moe, that the fish-dino doesn’t really exist (because Moe hides at the start). Petrie pipes up saying, “it’s okay to have an imaginary friend. I have one.” And then they have a song about imaginary friends. We even eventually see his imaginary friend, and it looks like a bulbous dragon. It’s a weird development for the movie, but if it makes kids feel okay about their own imaginary friends, if they have any, then I guess that’s cool. It’s certainly not as weird as introducing aliens into the franchise, so, again, that’s something.

Still, for the most part this feels like a film just treading water (no pun intended) as it goes through the motions of adventures we’ve seen before. Another journey to the ocean, another time the heroic kids wander off on their own. It’s all been done before, and the films are just moving the pieces around at this point, over and over. It’s one of the better films in the late period of the franchise simply because they can’t get much worse than The The Stone of Cold Fire. But is it really good? No. These films suck. This one just sucks slightly less.