The Land Before Time Has An Animated History

While not as popular as some of the big-ticket movies from major studios like Disney and Dreamworks, "The Land Before Time" is still a solid member of the B-team of childhood animated classics. Even if it's not as overwhelmingly successful as the likes of "Shrek" and "The Lion King," none of its competitors can match the mind-boggling number of sequels and spinoffs "The Land Before Time" spawned: 13 direct-to-video sequels, 14 video games, and a TV show.

You need a solid foundation for a structure that size, and the original "The Land Before Time" delivers. Kids are bound to lap up anything with cute talking dinosaurs, but it's not just kids' stuff. Dead parents are practically a cliché in animated movies, but few deal with the resultant grief as thoughtfully as "The Land Before Time" does. The production design reflects that underlying darkness, starting with the stark beauty of the threatening, shadowy world of the dinosaurs' last days, mixed with psychedelic colors to create a film that looks like few others.

None of this wouldn't have been possible without a dream team of behind-the-scenes talent — producers Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and Kathleen Kennedy, along with director Don Bluth, an ex-Disney man coming hot off the back-to-back successes of "The Secret of NIMH," "An American Tail," and the "Dragon's Lair" games. As for how these artists brought their vision to the screen, that's at least as interesting a story as Littlefoot and friends' journey to the Great Valley. Here are the highlights.

One part of Spielberg's pitch is especially intriguing, but sadly never made it to the screen. Possibly inspired by "Fantasia," he wanted "The Land Before Time" to tell its story without a spoken word. Unfortunately, this fell by the wayside pretty quickly.

The dream of a silent dinosaur movie lived on, though. According to Cinefantastique, the project that wound up becoming Disney's "Dinosaur" began with an idea from "RoboCop" director Paul Verhoeven and "Jurassic Park" effects artist Phil Tippett, which Tippett described as "a gritty true-life adventure where all the storytelling would be carried on in action and pantomime." He added that Disney would have had to release it on one of their adult-oriented labels like Hollywood Pictures, and it's quickly clear why: "There was a gigantic battle at the end as a comet moves closer and closer to Earth," Tippett explained. "The fight was between the sympathetic Styracosaurus and the antagonist Tyrannosaurus rex, and although the good guy wins, there's nothing to win any more because the comet hits Earth, and all the dinosaurs die."

After Verhoeven and Tippett left, Ralph Zondag, animation director on "The Land Before Time," took over. According to SyFy, Disney then insisted on having a narrator, or a talking mammal, or giving the dinosaurs internal monologues, until "Dinosaur" eventually became just another talking-animal movie.

Everyone remembers the death of Bambi's mother. For many young viewers, it was their introduction to the concept of death in general. But in many ways, Don Bluth handles the death of Littlefoot's mother even more sensitively. Bambi's mother dies offscreen and is never mentioned again. Littlefoot stays with his mom through her last breath, and his loss becomes one of his defining character traits.

This is heavy stuff to lay on kids, and Bluth tread carefully. John Cawley describes how the director consulted psychological experts on how best to handle the sequence. Bluth almost cut the plot point entirely before he realized he couldn't show the arc of Littlefoot maturing if his parents were still in the picture. On the psychologists' advice, he added a new character named Rooter to "soften the blow" and teach Littlefoot (and by extension, the children in the audience) about healthy coping mechanisms and the meaning of death. If the scenes of Littlefoot waiting by his mother's side as she dies and consulting her ghost in the clouds remind you of "The Lion King," the scene with Rooter should confirm once and for all that Disney was taking notes: He discusses "the Circle of Life," the central theme of the later movie.

"The Land Before Time" has millions of fans, but its director isn't one of them. John Cawley's book describes Don Bluth fighting to get the darkness and complexity that had made "The Secret of NIMH" (and "Bambi" and "Fantasia" for that matter) such an enduring masterpiece into "Land," which put him "at odds with the other parties' desires to produce 'a cute movie about dinosaur kids,' as one executive called the project." "The Animated Movie Guide" quotes an interview with Bluth by the Chicago Sun-Times that boils it down to the simplest terms: "I didn't have a free enough hand."

That's something every filmmaker — and any artist in a collaborative medium — has to deal with eventually. But it's not hard to understand Bluth's frustration when decisions aren't just being made for you by your bosses, but by their children too. If you're wondering why all the dinosaur kids sound like real kids except for Petrie, here's your answer: Cawley writes that Steven Spielberg's son Max suggested casting "Digit's voice" as the little pterosaur. In adult terms, that means Will Ryan, who played Digit the cockroach accountant in "An American Tail," along with over 100 other roles spanning 40 years, including Dale in "Chip 'n' Dale Rescue Rangers," the Duck Brothers in "Courage the Cowardly Dog," and multiple G.I. Joes.

One of the oddest things about "The Land Before Time" is its running time: one hour and 10 minutes, barely feature-length even for an animated children's film. Most movies that long are made on the quick and cheap, but the lush animation and effects obviously don't place "The Land Before Time" in that category. In fact, it's just the opposite: The producers took a major financial loss to cut the movie down to that length.

Don Bluth's career was based on the premise that kids can handle more than adults give them credit for.  You can see this approach in the horrific imagery and explicit violence in "The Secret of NIMH," the themes of abandonment and antisemitism in "An American Tail," and the vision of hell in "All Dogs Go to Heaven."

Bluth originally planned for "The Land Before Time" to be more of the same. But John Cawley quotes an Animation Magazine article describing how Spielberg and Lucas balked at his vision. They cut 10 minutes of animated, inked, and painted footage, which Cawley estimates cost a million dollars, because they "felt that it was too frightening and could even cause some psychological damage in very young children." Some 19 scenes were scrapped altogether, with a special focus on moments of the characters in mortal danger. Scribbles to Screen's breakdown fills in the gaps with storyboards and trailers to suggest what the deleted scenes might have looked like.

Content note: This slide contains descriptions of child abuse, domestic abuse, and murder.

One of the breakout stars of "The Land Before Time" was Judith Barsi, who plays the appropriately named "big mouth" Duckie, with her distinctive habit of repeating words ("Yep! Yep! Yep!" "Nope! Nope! Nope!"). Bluth was impressed enough with Barsi to give her a bigger role in his next project, "All Dogs Go to Heaven." 

But fame couldn't protect Barsi from her abusive father. If anything, it made a bad situation worse: the Los Angeles Times reported that he said goodbye to her as she left home to film "Jaws: The Revenge" by brandishing a knife and threatening to kill her if she didn't come back. He followed up on that threat before Barsi could hear herself onscreen in either "Time" or "Dogs." In July 1988, he killed his daughter, his wife, and himself. Barsi was only 10 years old.

There's no happy ending to a crime that horrific, but Barsi's surviving family at least managed to put together a fitting tribute to her tragically short life. She's buried next to her mother at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Los Angeles, with the epitaph "Yep! Yep! Yep!" It's both a poignant tribute to her too-brief career and an optimistic message in a situation that didn't seem to have any bright side.

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