The Land Before Time II: The Great Valley Adventure

The Land Before Time II: The Great Valley Adventure
Production Order: 2
Air Order: 2
Release Date: December 23, 1994

To catch you up: In The Land Before Time, a good movie, a "longneck" dinosaur named Littlefoot is heading for The Great Valley with his mother and grandparents after a famine. He makes friends with a triceratops named Cera, whose racist-ass father tells her that "three-horns don't play with longnecks." Littlefoot's mother dies defending him from a "sharptooth." Don Bluth, who made this film, said he wanted "Bambi, but with dinosaurs," so that's what you get: a dead mom, and a kid making his way in the world with a few friends. Littlefoot and Cera get separated from the grown-ups. They meet other kid-friends: Petrie, a "flyer;" Ducky, a "swimmer;" and Spike, a "spike-tail." Together, they get into adventures both good and bad, and finally reunite with their families in The Great Valley. It was a good film with lovely animation, a pretty solid plot, and a theme song by Diana Ross.

The film being reviewed here is not that film. The Great Valley Adventure is the direct-to-video sequel, has okay television-quality animation, and fucking sing-along songs that will give you PTSD when you accidentally view this film 20+ years later. Because you know all the words. And they get stuck in your head until you want to give yourself an ice pick lobotomy to MAKE IT STOP.

Anyway...

We start out with views of the Milky Way, and some quasi-hopeful music that turns kind of dramatic as we see meteors and stuff flying through space and starting to enter the atmosphere on a prehistoric Earth.
There's a narrator. He tells us that millions of years before humans, giant lizards roamed the Earth.
This is the part where Creationists turn the video off, and put on some Barney for their kids, because while annoying, Barney never got blasphemous.
The narrator continues on by telling us that there were different kinds of dinosaurs. One kind eats plants. And the camera pans across a bunch of small, quiet scenes of different dinosaurs eating vegetation.

Then the music changes to something decidedly more sinister, and we're introduced to the "the dreaded sharptooth, who eats other dinosaurs."

(This film was brought to you by Big Vegetation. Angry BBQ advocates will turn this off now and put on Barney, because Barney is a red-blooded American T-rex. Jokes on them, though: Barney eats PB&J.)

Anyway, enough about sharpteeth, because the plant-eaters live in The Great Valley, where predators can't get them.
Frankly, that sounds like crap because, you know

but I didn't write the script, so if  "protected space where plant-eaters can avoid the circle of life" is what they're going for, so be it. Here's the Great Valley set.

So now we meet our main characters:

Littlefoot

Cera

Ducky

Petrie

Spike

and we go right into that first awful sing-along song about how they're happy and having a good time in their valley, as carefully watched over by loving parents and grandparents. They frolic and crap, and I guess Cera's dad has gotten over his "three-horns don't play with longnecks" bullshit. The music for this song isn't awful, but the lyrics are cloying and don't quite fit. I think they might have been going for a Kids Bop vibe, but I fucking hate Kids Bop, which pretty much tells you where I stand on this thing.
The kids get called off by their parents for dinner, which is hilarious, because the food is everywhere.
"Wait," says the narrator, "cuz the Valley still has dangers."
Whaaaaaat? You tricked me, movie? I thought this was a perfect place to grow up with no predators or anything?
We meet some villains. They're referred to as "egg-stealers." The grey one is Ozzy. The doofy brown one is Strut. They're villains, so of course they have British accents. Ozzy wants them to eat eggs. Strut is hungry and chows down on vegetation. Ozzy chokes him and yells some abuse about grass-guzzling. Ozzy's an asshole, and it's obvious that Strut just kind of goes along with whatever Ozzy wants so that he takes less physical abuse.

 

Littlefoot and his gramps are eating some tree-stars (leaves), and Gramps pushes a tree trunk down so Littlefoot can get the last one. When Littlefoot tries to do the same, he ends up launching himself onto a series of tiny volcanoes (?) and then complains about wanting to be a grown-up.
Cera shows up and draws Littlefoot off. They run away to play.
Gramps tells no one in particular that the Valley is a great place to grow up.

Ozzy finds a nest. He's about to chomp down on some eggs when he gets bopped on the head with a rock.
Turns out the kids are at the top of a hill, rolling rocks down, and the mom shows up to yell at them, because her nest is where the rocks are ending up. Those are some fucking lucky eggs. They were almost dinner or crushed to death in the same breadth of space.
The kids are bored and Ducky suggests that they go to The Sheltering Grass and pretend that a sharptooth is chasing them. Most of them are on board, but Littlefoot points out that The Sheltering Grass is on the other side of the Sinking Sand, and that that shit's dangerous. His grandparents don't want him going there without them. Petrie, Ducky, and Spike agree that it is not exactly safe.
But Cera, who is a bully and kind of a jerk, insists that they're "all a bunch of eggs," which is not a terrible joke. I didn't laugh, but it's clever. So she bullies them into following her, completely forgetting how, in the first movie, pulling this kind of shit was usually what landed her (and them) in hot water.

They get to the Sinking Sand, and it isn't actually sand at all. It's a fucking tar pit. So what happens is what you know is going to happen: they're going to try to cross by hopping on rocks, but they'll all fall in. This scene sets up a weird trope where they each try to save the other, and only end up in more peril.
The parents hear them screaming, and Gramps pulls them out with his tail. The kids are in trouble.

Later that night, Ozzy and Strut are hiding in wait for everyone to settle in for the night so they can steal some eggs. Or, you know, Strut tries to eat some vegetation, and Ozzy smacks him around. Then we get a villain song about eggs. It's not as bad or sing-along as that first song, but not fantastic. It's vaudevillian, the way many villain songs are. A lot of egg puns here.

Littlefoot gets scolded by his grandparents for wandering off. Then he complains about being little again. He goes to sleep. His grandparents walk off. After, you know, talking abut how dangerous the Great Valley can still be. Good job with that Practicing and Preaching thing.
The camera pans up for a bit to show the stars, then drops back down to Littlefoot to show that time has passed. Cera is in the bushes, and wants to have a meeting with everyone, because she can't sleep. And even though her ideas are typically crap, they all meet up with her anyway.
Remember being a kid and having hard opinions on things and thinking adults watching out for your well-being is a complete injustice? That's her angle here.
"Did you all get the same lecture I did?" she demands.
They rattle off different versions of "stick close to us, don't wander off, there are dangers here."
"Don't hang out with longnecks, flyers, swimmers, and spiketails," Cera repeats.
Oh, hey. Looks like her dad is one of those two-faced racists that thanks Littlefoot's grandfather for saving his kid, but still talks shit about him when he's not there.
The looks on the other kids' faces tell Cera that her lecture contained something extra and shitty. And extra shitty.

 

She suggests that they run away from home. Ever the followers, Ducky and Petrie proclaim that they are on board, while logical, hesitant Littlefoot wavers.
"Let's just hang out here," he suggests. "It's pretty high up, and we can see cool stuff. Look, I see Ducky's nest."
They also see Ozzy and Strut walking away from the nest with an egg.
"We need to tell the grown-ups!" says Littlefoot.
"No!" says Cera. "Let's catch them ourselves, to prove that we're not hatchlings!"
Okay.
STFU, Cera. Your ideas are the literal worst, and never work out, and in fact, often backfire spectacularly.
AGAIN, Littlefoot is all, "that's not a good idea," and AGAIN, everyone else just falls in line with Cera. How many times to they have to almost die before they decide that she makes crap decisions? And once again, Littlefoot caves.
They run after Ozzy and Strut, shouting. The egg-stealers start climbing the Great Wall that keeps the Great Valley separated from the Mysterious Beyond.
Faced with the fact that her idea was utter shit, Cera stops at the base of the wall and admits that they need help.

Littlefoot points out that there's no time, and the egg-nappers will get away. Then he yells at Cera for being a coward, and they all go up the wall.
Near the top, Ozzy asks Strut how big their pursuers are. Strut sees their lengthening shadows and tells Ozzy "real big."
There's more precarious climbing. It starts to rain. Ozzy and Strut duck into a cave, and the kids follow a bit later. Cera takes her sweet-ass time, because for all of her bullying and bravado, she really is a complete coward. She's sent screaming inside from a peal of thunder.
The cave is dark enough that no one can see properly. Strut fumbles the egg. In feeling around for it, Ozzy grabs Littlefoot by the head. Lightning and thunder strike again, sending everyone running and screaming around the cave like chickens with their heads cut off.

Cera runs head-first into what turns out to be a load-bearing pile of rocks. It causes a landslide-explosion thing wherein everyone ends up being projected from the cave entrance, and a hole is made in the Great Wall. More landslide. For some reason, Strut ends up fumbling the egg while surfing on a rock as the hill slides down into the valley?

He loses it, and it rolls back into Ducky's home nest.
Wow, how fucking convenient. Somehow, the landslide came nowhere close? Like, I know they needed to resolve the Ducky's-sibling-gets-kidnapped plot nicely for the children viewing, but the fact that the landslide not only came nowhere near the nest, but failed to wake anybody, is more than a miracle.

The landslide ends at a small cliff, at the bottom of which is another fucking tar pit full of dino skeletons. The kids all start laughing. But then there's a spooky sound.

"We're in the Mysterious Beyond!" says Littlefoot.
"What about the egg?" asks Ducky, who did not see the bullshit storyboards about it being back in the nest.
"I think it got smushed," admits Littlefoot, which would make far more fucking sense than it rolling back to safety.
Ducky starts crying, and her friends hand her the same crapola that everyone says to people who are grieving - it's part of the circle of life, there were lots of other eggs in the nest, dumb shit that isn't comforting. She sits down and fails to notice the big ole egg behind her. Until she does.
Then they kidnap somebody else's freaking kid and carrying back to the nest, where Ducky's unobservant parents are still sleeping.

Ducky goes to put that big-ass egg in the nest, and then counts. "The egg was already back!"

So now they have someone else's kid. They come up with a plan to take care of the egg until it hatches, then give it back to whichever family it belongs to.
Littlefoot wants to tell the grown-ups.
Cera bullies him into staying quiet.
I'm REALLY tired of these tropes, y'all.
Littlefoot has no spine. None. Cera suggests some dumb fucking thing, and he hesitantly suggests going to some adults about it, but then Cera bullies him into keeping his mouth shut. Not only is she a loud-mouth and a bully, but half the time her bravado slips and Littlefoot of all people has to tell her to fortify the fuck up. Ducky and Petrie switch sides at the drop of a hat, but ultimately follow Cera on her dumbshit plans. Right now, the only character that hasn't completely pissed me off is Spike, the dude with no lines.
Littlefoot climbs back into his nest-hole and falls asleep, only to be wakened by his grandmother right away, because it's morning. Rude.

The kids gather around the egg, which they've put in a hollow tree stump. They guess who might be inside, and Littlefoot suggests that they might be the egg's parents. The others laugh him down.
"That's silly!" says Cera. "How could we be its parents?"
You're right, Cera. That's the sort of silly shit that you'd suggest.
But then they all fall in line with Littlefoot's idiotic idea.
"It'll be fun!"
*annoyed sigh*
Fine. Whatever.

The egg starts hatching.
The kids all gather around excitedly. But the critter that comes out is unexpected.
"Sharptooth!" they all scream. And they literally run over Ozzy and Strut on their way away from that cute little confused dino.

Littlefoot goes back and decides to do some parenting, because why not? He teaches the top-heavy baby to walk, then names him Chomper when he eats a dragonfly.
"Maybe I can teach you to be vegetarian."
Sure, kid.
When that doesn't work, he decides to get advice from his grandparents. And like an excellent parent, he tells his newborn "stay here," and walks away. So his newborn follows some butterflies, and walks away too.

Littlefoot approaches his grandparents.
"Can I ask about babies?"
They exchange a look, because they clearly weren't expecting to have The Sex Talk until later.
He manages to get them to tell him about feeding babies, to wit:
1. He should get the food for Chomper, as the adultiest-adult in Chomper's life;
2. Babies eat when they're hungry;
3. Babies don't always eat what you want them to eat, but they'll eat when they get hungry enough.
What they fail to mention because they don't know to tell him:
4. You can't make an obligate carnivore into a vegetarian, because their systems don't function that way.

He thanks them and leaves without telling them why he wanted to talk about babies, then they talk briefly about how the kids all want to grow up so fast, then will want to be young again when they're finally older.
I'm surprised that Gramps doesn't again state how awesome the Valley is for raising children.

The other kids show up at the nest site again, looking for Littlefoot. When they don't see him, Ducky surmises that Chompy ate him.
You... you think a dinosaur half Littlefoot's size ate him? Leaving no trace behind?
The others are all sad, because if one person in this group proposes something crazy, they must all believe it as well.
No time to be sad, though - Ozzy and Strut arrive to chase them away.
Literally one second later, Littlefoot stumbles back to the nest, surprised and dismayed to find Chomper gone. He searches for 30 seconds, then finds the sharptooth still chasing a butterfly, by hopping rock to rock across the Sinking Sand.
The danger is short-lived: Littlefoot frets over Chomper being in danger... then Chomper hops rocks back to Littlefoot... then Littlefoot scolds him for "making me worry."

But now there's a scream. Ozzy and Strut have the kids backed up to the edge of a cliff, which Littlefoot can see and hear, but no grown-ups can...?
"Stay here!" he tells Chompy, because that worked so well last time.

On the cliff, Ozzy demands to know what the kids did with the egg.
"It hatched!" says Cera.
"That was my dinner!" howls Ozzy.
"It was just an egg," shrugs Strut.
And Ozzy kicks him in the fucking face.
Now's the time, Strut. Pack a bag, take the dog, and just go.

Littlefoot comes up from behind to yell at Ozzy to leave his friends alone, but then he stumbles on a rock and falls over backward, while Ozzy threatens him.
And now Chomper, who has definitely not stayed where Littlefoot left him, pulls that same accidental giant shadow trick that the kids also accidentally pulled before. It looks like a huge sharptooth is coming. Chomper also roars, but it doesn't come out like his regular squeak, now it sounds bigger and more menacing.
Everyone yells "zomg, sharptooth!" and Ozzy and Strut jump over the cliff to save themselves.
The kids all cower and shake, even Littlefoot, who actually knows the only freaking sharptooth in the Valley.

Littlefoot introduces the others to Chomper, and they sing a song about how "we're a family, and you're one of us now." Instant acceptance. Which is great, until he bites Cera.
"A sharptooth can never be one of us!" she yells.

Can you blame him? I'd like to bite her, too

After getting into it with Littlefoot, she runs off, angry. Ducky then snaps at Chomper that he can't eat Petrie, despite Chomper not making any move to do so. Then Ducky is sad, because she realizes that she said no, "just like my parents." This is not the first time she has said this to them. It's a revelation she keeps having, and while it was fine the first time, now it just feels like lazy writing to keep having the characters repeat things like that.
Littlefoot tells Chomper that he can't do things like that here, that sharpteeth aren't allowed in The Great Valley. Even though Chomper is a few hours old, he clearly understands English, and is sad-mad. He runs off, crying and confused.
"Maybe you should think about not inviting him back," suggests Ducky to Littlefoot. "He's different than us."
Littlefoot declares that he doesn't care, and follows Chomper.

Remember that big ole hole in the wall around the Great Valley? Two sharpteeth get in through there.

Dramatic music! A darkening of the screen where a commercial would go, if this was being shown on a television channel that has commercials!

For some reason, Ozzy and Strut climb back up the cliff, even though it's obvious that they could have just walked someplace new from where they were. They discuss the hope that the sharptooth ate the kids, and Ozzy declares that they should find another egg.
When they run off-camera, you're supposed to notice that the volcano in the background is billowing black and red smoke, and that it's heavier than the smoke that was coming out when Chomper ran in that direction a few minutes earlier.

Wait, now all of the kids are looking for Chomper? Including Cera, Ducky and Petrie, who straight-up said they were not into the idea of Chomper being part of their group? Despite calling his name, and walking around with the group, Cera declares that she doesn't care if they find him or not.
Littlefoot offers some mediocre shade: "No one asked you to come, Cera."
Everybody bitches about being hungry and tired.
Littlefoot turns a corner and calls to the others that he has found Chomper: tiny dude has followed yet another bug up the Smoking Mountain. (Remember that foreshadowing from a second ago?)

The kids start yelling to Chomper that they're coming for him. Up on yet another cliff, Ozzy and Strut are trying to steal from another nest, and Ozzy fears that the kids' yelling will attract the missing mother back to the nest. Which it does. She chases them into a small cave, and Ozzy vows to get revenge on the kids. They head down to the foothill areas around the volcano base, and trap the kids in a less-than-safe spot.
"You better leave us alone!" yells Cera. "We're friends with a sharptooth!"

A portrait of Cera

"Prove you're friends with a sharptooth," Ozzy challenges.

Strut says he's satisfied with the fact that they saw a shadow of the sharptooth, and he really doesn't need a face-to-face meeting.

Cera, quick to own people, laughs and tells the egg-stealers that the shadow they saw was a baby, not an adult. THEREBY RUINING THE RUSE.

Littlefoot is thisclose to calling her a dumbfuck when the volcano erupts. Ozzy and Strut tumble backward down the mountainside. The kids scream and run away from the lava flow. So now we get a series of scenes of the kids running and screaming, lava flowing down the mountain, and Ozzy and Strut yelling at the kids. Or rather, Ozzy yelling and Strut just going along with it because he hasn't got anything better to do. Actually, he does. He could get the fuck off of the exploding mountain and stop following kids around for no reason. But because he doesn't, Chomper bites his ass.

So now the kids are stuck between lava flows and egg-stealers, and Littlefoot stops to have a convo in his head with his grandfather about being little. Dude, you gonna die. Get on with it.

He pushes a tree over to bridge the gap between them and an escape route. He runs across and yells to the others to follow. They make it across in time, but then Ozzy tries to follow. The tree catches fire, and Ozzy plummets to the ground. Strut jumps after him.

 Oops, here are those two sharpteeth.

The kids run down the hill screaming.
Across the Valley, Littlefoot's grandparents hear the sharpteeth roar, and hurry to warn their friends.
The kids manage to hide and catch their breath, and Littlefoot says he thinks the sharpteeth got in when that landslide made a hole in the Great Wall.
But oh crap, now there's this new problem: Littlefoot sees his grandfather fighting one of the sharpteeth, and he thinks that he's probably not going to become an appetizer, so he runs off to "help." Chomper runs after him.

A flyer, probably one of Petrie's parents, distracts the sharptooth. (Where tf is the other one?) The flyer leads the sharptooth into the woods, where Littlefoot and Chomper pull a vine across the opening in the forest, creating a trip-wire, and take the sharptooth down.

The kids duck into a nearby cave. Or some of them do. Petrie and Ducky are in a tree, and pelt the sharptooth with coconuts. This sets off another sequence of events where one or more of the kids tries to rescue another and then gets into trouble themselves. So the sharptooth goes after Ducky and Petrie, who scream. (What were they expecting?) Cera charges at the back of one of the sharptooth's feet. He then goes after her, and she yells for Spike, who pushes a rock off the side of a mountain, and onto the head of the sharptooth.

They run away celebrating, but here comes sharptooth #2. Cera runs away, but Spike is scared stiff. So Ducky jumps on the sharptooth's head. But now she's trapped between the two sharpteeth. And here comes Petrie to save her.

Petrie wipes out on the side of a tree, and the two sharpteeth come after them again, but the parents have heard the screams, and come to the rescue. They beat the crap out of the sharpteeth, who then run away. The kids come out celebrating. Except for Chomper, who runs away.
All of the adults try to figure out how the sharpteeth got into their perfect little Valley, and the kids try to lie at first, but then Cera spills the beans about the hole in the wall..

"No idea, Grandma. They must have apparated in."

The adults are all, "stay here," and in the history of this movie, has that ever worked? Like, ever?
Fuck no, it hasn't. They couldn't have left at least one adult behind to watch their kids? I know they don't know half of what the kids have done in the last two days or so, but the entire last movie was more of the same, so you'd think they'd know better.
Cera declares that she's going to help the adults.
Littlefoot realizes that Chomper is gone, and runs off to find him.

The two sharpteeth lumber through the woods, and somehow, Chomper wanders right past them. Littlefoot happens to find him, which is convenient. The sharpteeth appear again, and Littlefoot and Chomper run again, but instead of being dramatic, the music is weird and cartoony and light and playful.
They run across a hollow log that spans a gap, and Littlefoot's foot breaks through the bottom - he is stuck. The sharpteeth come, and surprise, Chomper starts babbling at them. One sharptooth licks Chomper, and he crawls on its nose.
"Oh, those are his parents," says Littlefoot to no one.
Shocker. You found a baby T-rex, and two T-rexes show up.

The trio takes off, and Littlefoot manages to free his foot. He climbs down from the tree when -

Y'all, fuck these guys. Seriously. They're minor characters that show up for some slapsticky comedy relief that isn't even very good, and they have weird revenge plots. I also figured Strut to be a hapless sidekick with no real motivation for anything, but here he is, asking Ozzy if they can toss Littlefoot off the Great Wall. Fuck Strut. And fuck Ozzy.

The sharptooth family is making their way back to the gap in the wall when Chomper hears Littlefoot scream. And you know, they're a family and he's one of them now, so he's going to run to the rescue, then get himself in trouble. Which happens. Chomper tries that growly shadow thing again, but Ozzy grabs him around the throat.
Only this time, there are two actual adult sharpteeth, who chase them into the Mysterious Beyond.

Littlefoot tells Chomper that he needs to hurry and follow his parents, because they're leaving, and the hole is being filled, and he can't take care of him anymore. For some reason, the rest of the kids show up out of nowhere to say goodbye, and the music that plays is the well-written suite from the first movie, which is a much higher quality than the sing-alongs in these direct-to-video films, and is placed there so that you feel something when the cute little dinosaur leaves his new friends to go back to his parents.

The kids go back to the place where the hole in the wall is being filled, and Gramps asks if he's sure that the sharpteeth left, and I don't understand why Gramps wouldn't know the answer to that, because there's only one way in or out with that hole in the wall, right? If the sharpteeth took another route out, shouldn't they be concerned about that as well?
Anyway, Littlefoot gets another lecture, and then he helps repair the wall.

 And we end with a reprise of that first terrible sing-along.

Uggggh. Okay. So what we have here is one pretty great movie, followed by 13 mediocre direct-to-video sequels.
And this one is the first mediocre sequel.
"But wait," you say, "why did they bother making a bunch of movies? Why didn't they just make an animated series, which would have been easier?"
To which I reply: "They did. One season, 26 episodes, from 2007-2008, and it takes place after the thirteenth movie, The Wisdom of Friends."
They basically made this sequel, then pretty much made one a year from 1994 to 2007, made a series, then waited eight years, and made one more. You can watch ten of the movies on Hulu. Or buy them as a complete DVD set. Or watch the show on their very own YouTube Channel. Or play one of one of fourteen video games based on this franchise. If you're looking for something inoffensive to plop your kids in front of for a while, I suppose you can't really go wrong with these saccharine sequels. The original is a bit scary at times, so maybe watch that one with them, depending on the kid? I dunno. Do what you want.
Now, I don't hate all sequels. I actually really like sequels, and a handful I would consider just as good as the original. Nor do I hate direct-to-video movies. I've seen some good ones there as well. But with those DTV sequels, you know you're not getting the higher-quality product. The producers, directors, music-makers, and artists of the original film have been assigned elsewhere, as have their larger budget. What you're getting here is the lower-budget television animation, which isn't awful, but lacks the depth required to make the magic happen. (This is where I want to insert a joke about multi-plane cameras, but remind myself that that's a joke that maybe two people would find funny.)

What I DO hate are these movies. I'm biased, and aware. I was a teenager with preschool-aged siblings, and never saw anything rated PG-13 or above until I turned 18 and MOVED THE FUCK OUT. So this was my teen years. Barney and The Land Before Time sequels. VeggieTales Silly Songs (which are not actually that bad).
I'm not the only one. Total Film ranked this movie 7th in "50 Worst Kids' Movies."
Besides lacking director/producer Don Bluth and executive producers George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, the sequels had another change: they became sing-alongs. I have many problems with the terrible songs in this movie. There are three, and the villain song is not the worst thing I've ever heard, but the happy-peppy everything-is-great songs that bookend it are just the freaking worst. The lyrics don't always fit the rhythm of the song and have to be forced in with a shoehorn. They're so sweet they make my teeth ache. And worst of all, they're catchy, so they'll be stuck in my head forever. Again. Hooray.
As for timing, this movie is too long. Seriously, they do that trope where the kids try to save each other (and end up in bigger trouble) far too often. It bloats the storyline. When bigger trouble hits, Ducky falls off of other characters and has to be saved quite a bit, too. Ozzy and Strut go over cliffs five fucking times. With a run time of an hour and fifteen minutes, I'm left wondering if they padded the script with this stuff to make some kind of projected time goal.
The kids scream a lot. A LOT. And I've already talked about how the characters were starting to piss me off. We're supposed to be sympathetic to Littlefoot, but without the journey goal of the first movie, his character becomes someone that often thinks of consulting adults, but just rolls over under Cera's demands. Cera... why are they friends with her? I guess they're just being nice and including her, but she's irritating as hell. She's a bully, insists that everyone follow her bad ideas, and I can't tell if she's racist like her father. Ducky and Petrie I liked well enough in the original movie, but I don't recall them being such freaking followers. They change their opinions like they're following a tennis match. In the end, only Spike didn't annoy me consistently. Okay, and Chomper. Chomper is just cute. No complaints on him.

Also, there's a weird dichotomy here: some of the dinosaurs can talk, and have thoughts and feels. Some cannot, and are treated like animals. (Spike is just... a talker who doesn't? I dunno. He's a non-verbal dude, and that part honestly doesn't bother me.) In the original talks, Spielberg and Lucas wanted the dinosaurs to not talk at all, like the Rite of Spring segment from  Disney's Fantasia, but they ditched that idea and gave the dinos voices to appeal to kids. Yet... some don't talk at all, mainly the sharpteeth in this film. Was it to drive home the idea that they're mindless killing machines? (In the sequel "The Mysterious Island," Chomper returns to The Great Valley, and can supposedly speak both the languages of the "sharpteeth" and "leaf-eaters," so I guess it was finally settled a few years later that they speak different languages. Interestingly, when Chomper's parents speak to one another in The Mysterious Island, they are subtitled. That's all I ask, y'all. Fix your continuity issues and loopholes, and make it make sense in the canon.)

Things that didn't suck:

If this movie was your jam when you were little, don't let me rain on your parade. Nostalgia is a heavy drug. If you wanna put it on and rock out to "We're a family and You're One of Us Now," then you do you, boo-boo. It'll never be one of mine, but we can disagree.

My roommate remembers this film fondly, as a queer kid growing up in a tiny-ass town, as being a film about being able to choose one's own family. It's a theme common to queer kids who are rejected by biological families, and who must assemble their own from close friends. He assured me that he was not the only queer kid who felt this way. So hey, that's awesome. Take your inspiration from wherever you can get it.

The original films, and I guess the subsequent ones as well, include the theme of being friends with everyone, and not discriminating. Which is fantastic. Littlefoot becomes friends with dinos of other species, and Ducky adopts Spike in a similar way to Chunk from The Goonies adopting Sloth. Cool. In this film, Littlefoot kind of adopts Chomper as his own, despite being a different species. The others kinda-sorta-sometimes agree. And acceptance of others, especially those who look or are different, is a great skill to be teaching kids. More of this, please.

BUT

It kind of falls apart once one reaches an age where it's obvious that there's going to be a problem with this kind of friendship: Chompy's people literally view plant-eaters as food. Like, could you be friends with a cannibal, knowing that they had no rhyme or reason for choosing who they ate? You'd have to be Right On Top Of That, Rose with checking in with that friend, ensuring you never pissed them off, made sure you were all good with their family. That's a lot of work for a friendship, and it can become one-sided easily.

Anyway, I'm going to leave you with this:

I'm sorry, did you say fucking aliens?

Fun Facts:

- Ozzy and Strut aren't necessarily given species, but Strut is short for Struthiomimus and Ozzy is a play on Oviraptor. The Villains Wiki says that even though scientists are not exactly sure what Struthiomimus ate, there is the possibility that they were omnivores, making Strut's eating of plants perfectly okay. Villain's Wiki then goes on to suggest that, because of this, Ozzy's insistence that they only eat eggs makes him a bit of a drug-pusher. No, not kidding.

- Strut is voiced by Rob Paulsen, who also voiced Pinky from "Pinky and the Brain."
- Kenneth Mars, who voiced Littlefoot's grandfather in this movie, sounded incredibly familiar. He also voiced King Triton in The Little Mermaid.
- Candace Hutson, who voiced Cera, was the only voice actor from the original movie that returned for the sequels. She played Cera for the first four films. (Anndi McAfee took her place for the remaining films as Cera.)
- Littlefoot's original name was Thunderfoot, and stayed that way until late into production on the first film, when it was discovered that there was a triceratops in a children's book with that name.
- Cera was originally a male triceratops named Bambo.
- Petrie is not technically a dinosaur.
- Spike was based on Don Bluth's Chow Chow, Cubby.





Number of times that Ozzy and Strut go off a cliff: 5. Five fucking times.
Number of times Littlefoot gets scolded by his grandparents: 3
Number of egg puns: 3. I'm kind of underwhelmed.
Number of times The Kids start to save one another, only to have it backfire: 11. ELEVEN.

This duck is having a better time than I am