Wandering Out into the Mists Beyond

Are these films… actually starting to get… good? I don’t want to give too much credit to director Charles Grosvenor, who has led this series since The Mysterious Island and has taken the films through some highs and very low lows, but it’s starting to feel like maybe this series is starting to come on a solid upswing. The storytelling is getting better, the films are finding little character development moments to focus on, and there’s a greater and greater sense of continuity in the stories as we move along. It’s interesting to see.

I think some of this, of course, comes from the fact that the seventh film, The Stone of Cold Fire, jumped the shark really hard. Anything is going to seem better than that film that not only wasted everyone’s time but also broke the internal logic and consistency of the series. Since that point my brain has cared a lot less about things like “reason” and “logic” within the confines of the world of The Land Before Time. We have magical aliens now. It’s like if someone tried to make a sequel to UHF and then said, “but we’re going to make it a grounded, focused drama.” You just can’t. Once that ship has sailed you can’t shift things back.

The Great Longneck Migration is a film that would have irritated me if it had come out before The Stone of Cold Fire. It involves Littlefoot (now voiced by Alec Medlock) and all the other longnecks in the Great Valley having a “sleep story” about having to leave the valley and walk… somewhere. There they’d see the sun get blotted out, and rocks would fall from the sky, and the longnecks would fly up into the air and, well, at that point Littlefoot woke up and we don’t know what happened next. But it was a shared vision by all the longnecks, so they have to go and see what’s going on.

So Littlefoot, and his grandparents, leave the Great Valley to migrate where they’re supposed to go. While Cera is initially upset that Littlefoot is leaving and says that she doesn’t care if he goes, eventually she and the others (Ducky, Petrie, and Spike) sneak out under cover of night to find Littlefoot and join him in the migration. What they find, though, is that so many of the longnecks are migrating to a big, craterous, new valley, and that this whole vision thing might be something even more important… whenever the magical event plays out.

I should be seriously annoyed by this film, I do recognize that. Collective visions, a magical gathering place, all the dinosaurs coming together to (at least in their heads) stop the end of the world. This is all stuff that, had it been put into an earlier film in the series, I would have likely turned the film off because it was all just so stupid. But, again, we already have aliens in this series and my brain doesn’t care as much. So the longnecks have a mass hallucination and end up going to a giant meteor crater so they can witness an eclipse and a meteor shower. We’ve already had weirder, dumber storylines. This is fine.

But, in the process of this story, we get a few interesting things along the way. One, Cera learns a lesson in treating friends with respect. Of course this is a lesson she should have already learned multiple times before, but with Littlefoot off on his own adventure, Cera has to step up as group leader and this lesson plays out differently. She realizes she really likes Littlefoot and wants to be wherever he is (more so than she wants to be around her actual family, which is not a message I think the film was trying to emphasize) and so she sucks it up and leads the pack on an adventure to rejoin him. It’s sweet, in a way.

We also get a story about family. Littlefoot and his grandparents make it to the crater, where all the other longnecks are, and we’re introduced to an important new character: Bron (voiced here by Keifer Sutherland), Littlefoot’s father. It hadn’t ever been explained before where Littlefoot’s dad went, just that he wasn’t around while Littlefoot was growing up. This film sort of fleshes that out, saying that he was separated from the herd before Littlefoot hatched, but that he was always proud of his son and told everyone he had a boy out there… somewhere.

Now, I do want to poke some holes in this, simply because I have to, and the biggest one I want to note is that if Bron disappeared from Littlefoot’s life before he was even born, then there would have been no way he could have known if he had a boy or a girl out there. It’s not as if the dinosaurs have ultrasound machines they can use on eggs to determine gender. They’re just eggs, round and unremarkable. He could have hoped he had a son, but that’s not what he said. And weirdly, by the same token, he never asked about Littlefoot’s mother, already assuming she was dead. Bron knows more than he lets on. He knows too much.

Maybe we should all be looking at Bron as the real murderer. Not the sharptooth that took her down. Arrest this dinosaur! Murderer!

All joking aside, Bron has magical knowledge about Littlefoot’s life he should, by any right, have. And it’s not as if he couldn’t have learned all this several movies ago. He had to have known where the longnecks were all headed. All the herd ever talked about was eventually getting to the Great Valley. They all memorized the directions to the Great Valley, how to get there, how long it would take. Over and over, that’s what they repeated. Bron should have known how to get there, and he should have shown up there years before. But he didn’t, and the film never addresses that, either.

It should come as no surprise, then, that while Bron and Littlefoot mate, the dad doesn’t stick around. Deadbeat has to go off with his new herd, back to wherever he’s been living with his new family. There’s a promise we’ll see him again, one day (which we eventually do, in an episode of the TV series and also the last film of the franchise), but the series has to reset itself back to neutral and that means Littlefoot and the familiar gang can go to the Great Valley. No one else is allowed in. Hell, even a new dinosaur they befriend and invite to come to the Great Valley, Pat (James Garner), disappears after this film, never to be seen again.

Perhaps it was Littlefoot who was the real killer, then? Can’t stand his friends making new acquaintances. Pat had to die! Arrest this dinosaur! Murderer!

Whatever the case, there are logic holes that we can poke into the film, sure. But it is nice to see the dinosaurs out and about, making friends, connecting with family, realizing the world is bigger than themselves. Having them bond with new people and learn life skills is neat, and they are starting to relate all of this back to things they’ve learned before. This film makes a point of emphasizing their adventures and how much fun they’ve had making new friends, even showing a clip of Moe, from Journey to Big Water, to show they, yes, these characters do still exist and don’t always vanish once the film ends (sorry, Pat). It’s the little things, like this, that help me get through these films.

Generally speaking, though, this was a more focused and more interesting adventure. You can’t really say anything of consequence was accomplished since, at the end of the day, the dinosaurs will go back to the Great Valley and continue the cycle all over again. But there were enough little moments sprinkled along the way that kept this film lively. It’s still a Land Before Time sequel so, yes, we’re judging on a curve here. But this is one of the few films so far in the series where I think the parents that put these films on for their kids could sit down and watch it with them. It’s tolerable in a way so many of these films before haven’t been.