Hacker Cinema
The Land Before Time
1988 · Film · 69 min
Directed by Don Bluth
An orphaned brontosaurus named Littlefoot sets off in search of the legendary Great Valley. A land of lush vegetation where the dinosaurs can thrive and live in peace. Along the way he meets four other young dinosaurs, each one a different species, and they encounter several obstacles as they learn to work together in order to survive.
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18 comments on Hacker News
Don Bluth made "The land before time" and that's an excellent dinosaur film.
Even the "Bad" bluth films are excellent. Rock a doodle do is a solid 8.5+/10 and I straight up think critics who leave that film with a bad rating are deluded.
Porco Rosso literally reuses music, animations, etc from his other films. I enjoyed the film because a fascist pig cassanova was a fascinating premise - but it's very much derivative.
I bench them against one another because my partner is obsessed with Miyazaki and finds Bluth films to be mundane in comparison. Miyazaki has far more cultural capital today than bluth - which is absurd since more Americans grew up watching the land before time than they did watching anything Miyazaki made.
Seconding other poster that all those were already famous. Like if you bought a small set of plastic dinosaurs before that movie, those would pretty much be guaranteed to be in the set, plus some sort of hadrosaur/duckbill and maybe an ankylosaurus.
Land Before Time included most of those in the “main cast” but I think it was following the trend, not setting it.
Velociraptor (well, the fake Deinonychus-like “velociraptor antirrhopus” or whatever from the book/movie) and definitely Dilophosaurus got a huge popularity boost from Jurassic Park.
> I will say that it seems entirely possible to relatively quickly see all US animated kids movies
Decent or better ones… maybe.
There’s a deep bench of poor-to-terrible animated kids’ movies that were straight to VHS/DVD/streaming. For god’s sake, there are like nine Land Before Time movies alone.
I'm with you. I think most of the star wars movies are pretty bad, but some of them are pretty good. And the bad ones don't make me feel worse about the good ones.
I think there has been a serious cultural shift in this regard sometime during the 00s. Most people used to understand that sequels are generally shitty and didn't make a big deal of this. S-tier classics from the likes of Disney used to get shitty straight-to-DVD sequels (e.g. Lion King 2) and nobody even thought to whine about it. Even movies that had very well received sequels would sometimes receive further sequels that were stinkers, and nobody started ranting about how the original was ruined because of it.
Alien and Aliens were great, then you got Alien 3, AvP, etc.. a bunch of mediocre slop to put it nicely (actually I like 3, but I admit it's deeply flawed). But when did you ever hear somebody say that AvP or Alien Resurrection ruined how they felt about Alien or Aliens? Terminator and T2; great movies that got a bunch of shitty spinoffs and sequels, but nobody said at the time that their enjoyment of the first two was ruined by what followed. James Bond has been a rollercoaster of quality for decades but it keeps going and fans enjoy calm respectful debates about which are their favorites. The Godzilla franchise has lots of quality interspersed with lots of crap, I don't hear many people saying that the horrible Minilla retroactively ruined King Kong vs. Godzilla, or for that matter, that King Kong vs. Godzilla ruined Godzilla (1954). The first Jurassic Park wasn't said to be ruined by the cashgrab sequels. The Land Before Time is still warmly remembered, despite 13(!) direct-to-dvd sequels.
Even in the early 2000s, I heard a lot of people saying they didn't like the Star Wars prequels, but I didn't hear many people saying the first three movies were ruined. Not until a few years later did this attitude start to find traction.
I think conflating violent or frightening scenes with tragic scenes is a mistake here.
As a young kid I watched Lion King and Land Before Time, which both feature dramatic depictions of the death of a parental figures, which both lead to kids fending for themselves. I don't remember being traumatized by this at all, and watched them repeatedly. As an adult I see the tragedy and it's kind of shocking, but I think as a kid it was just make-believe and I wasn't relating to the characters in that way. And obviously tons of other kids watched and loved these movies too.
On the other hand the more intense scenes from Indiana Jones were terrifying and burned deep into my brain.
I would like to simply block irrelevant YouTube ads while my toddler indulges in ‘Land before time’ episodes. Is that possible? Last time I checked they use some randomised domains to load ads...
I think the "common conception" comes from Land Before Time and Jurassic Park, it seems almost everything we learned about dinosaurs from those movies is wrong.
Edit:
I just looked it up and discovered both were made by Steven Speilberg...
Last week I was in the field digging dinosaurs in Montana, when one of the dig leaders mentioned there was no grass back then, just lots of ferns, because grass hadn't evolved yet.
It kind of blew my mind that for most of dinosaurs, there was just a lot of leafs and ferns.
Here's some pictures for context (https://imgur.com/a/rE5wwc4), when you're out where most dino bones are found, you forget that it may have been a lush landscape of riverbeds approaching the ocean coastline, or that it may have been a dry arid desert landscape like in the land before time movies. Regardless, it's odd to imagine all of it, with no grass.
Great little article. I was just talking to my mom the other day and I mentioned that I never forgot the day we were in the McDonald's drive-thru and I somehow convinced her to spend the 5 extra bucks to get the Land Before Time on VHS. I haven't thought of those movies in the article in years, and never knew the same team was behind them. I just remember being a kid and knowing that something was different about those films that separated them from other kids movies, even throughout the entire '90s. It's definitely an aesthetic that sticks with you, I can attest!
If you didn't grow up with Bluth's work and only know his studio's output from the later years (the unyielding torrent of direct to video Land Before Time sequels)...you really owe it to yourself to watch his studio's earlier stuff. It came at the moment where he had just struck off from Disney, disenfranchised by the output of the other major animation houses, and has his clearest vision.
The Secret of NIMH is, IMHO, one of the finest animated movies ever made, but An American Tail, the original Land Before Time and All Dogs Go to Heaven are all masterpieces in the own and couldn't really be matched in terms of narrative and animation excellence until the early Pixar movies. They definitely have a distinct aesthetic and a certain style of animation and storytelling unique to the production house.
They lost their way somewhere, I think it was Rock-a-Doodle, and the studio just started hemorrhaging money and losing connection with their audience. Their last two major gasps were Anastasia, a beautifully animated film with a poorly targeted audience demographic and Titan A.E., an ambition mixed-media project, which apparently ran out of money (among other problems) during production and resulted in some hilariously bad computer generated graphics at the end but I think stands up better than Disney's Treasure Planet response.
In the end, the studio floated themselves on cheaply produced, but child friendly, direct to video sequels of The Land Before Time, which is notable as being an unbroked series of sequels dating from 1988 to 2016 which at least has had the advantage of being a series of characters I can share with nieces and nephews who also grew up with the same characters...almost like Star Wars.
Ops yea, George Lucas put out the first 'the first land before time' movie but after that there was no real connection.
Ops, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg put out the first The Land Before Time movie which is why I was making the connection to Star Wars.
Especially since the former is targeted at broad appeal, while the latter is more specifically a series of children's movies.
Also, "The Land Before Time" was a Universal Studios product (per Wikipedia), not a Disney product, so the starting approach is very different.
I plan on seeing 8 and 9 (and the intervening Han Solo movie) in the theater on opening day with my brother, like I have for the previous 2.
You keep comparing "Star Wars" to "The Land Before Time". I think you vastly underestimate the popularity of Star Wars, particularly the past 2 movies.
Consider 8 had a $306,000,000 budget, 9 had a $200,000,000 budget. I have no problem saying it was profitable, but so was The Land Before Time 9. When a movie pulls in ~1/2 has much as the previous film it's a sign.
http://www.the-numbers.com/market/2016/top-grossing-movies
Just looking domestically we have Finding Dory (squeal), Rogue One (franchise), Captain America: Civil War (squeal), The Secret Life of Pets (kids movie), The Jungle Book (kids movie), Deadpool (franchise), Zootopia (kids movie), Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (franchise), Suicide Squad (franchise), Doctor Strange (franchise), Moana (kids movie) etc. Down at #14 The Revenant was at least nominally an original movie, though very similar to several other films.
I don't think any of these where bad for what they where, but there was nothing new for the 14-40 group. 2015 had #6 American Sniper, #9 The Martian, but was again mostly rehashed movies until #17.
Even if you're a staunch ally of safe, conservative family entertainment for its own sake, Disney was pretty damn crappy for a while. Look at their animated stuff in particular for plenty of mediocre storylines and bland animation (e.g. The Aristocats, The Fox and the Hound, Robin Hood). Children deserved better!
Eventually some meaningful competition from the likes of Don Bluth started to push them in the right direction (Secret of NIMH, Land before Time, All Dogs Go to Heaven, etc.) and not too long afterward they were doing things like Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin. Quite an improvement, though I dare say the storylines have never quite caught up. (Of course, all of Bluth's stuff would later be undermined as it was sequel-ized to Hell and back, like The Land Before Time XXIV: Teach Your Kids Roman Numerals Edition...)
Right now, though, after seeing Pixar's homages to Ghibli, I'm anticipating the impact of recent works like Puella Magi Madoka Magica, which really pushed some boundaries in Japan. (If you're not familiar with it, I'll just say... imagine if Pan's Labyrinth had been actively marketed to little children as a happy family film and an homage to Alice in Wonderland... and then translate that willful deception and the profound darkness onto Sailor Moon.) If it does make a splash in the youth entertainment industry at large, that will be quite interesting indeed.
As someone who has legitimately tried to use Bing let me just say, Bing's issue isn't its lack of indexing. Every time you search on Google you're "teaching" Google's system what results you'll most likely want.
So for example if I search for "that movie with dinosaurs" on Bing and Google, Bing's no.1 result is an IMDB link to a movie called "Dinosaur (2000)." That's not a "stupid" suggestion, but it is still not how people use search engines. Google shows me "jurassic park" and "the land before time" neither of which contain the word "dinosaur" in the title.
That's because millions of people have likely searched "that movie with a dinosaur" and clicked on the "Jurassic Park"/"Land Before Time" links. This information cannot be gained by simply just indexing no matter how amazing your indexer is.
So let's say, theoretically, that someone stole Google's code. They then reproduced Google's infrastructure, search algorithms, and so on but WITHOUT Google's massive database of historic queries. I legitimately do not think that this company, even with all of Google's stuff could catch up with Google, because 1. Those historic queries now ARE the core of Google's results, and 2. Google will always out-pace the competition in generating new intelligent results (due to more usage).
It is a circular problem. Bing could be twice as good as Google under the covers, but it will never catch up for the reasons I said above... Ditto with DDG or anyone else.
PS - As an aside, Google's search query parsing is significantly better than Bing's when it comes to programming/technical queries. Every time a quote appears in a bing query it treats it as a literal query string, Google seems to understand the context of the double quote (i.e. that it was from the source material) and give you non-literal query string results.