'Land Before Time' belly-flops as an animated adventure trip BY MICHAEL H. PRICE Fort Worth Star-Telegram Much has been made of Don Bluth's departure-in-frustration from the Disney animation shop, and his rival efforts since 1979 have met with enough popular success to prove the move worthwhile. Popular success doesn't say a great deal for popular tastes, though. Bluth, whose grasp of comedy and pacing is a tad more refined than that of Larry Harmon's inept Bozo the Clown cartoons of the 1960s, has consistently placed competent - sometimes dazzling - animation at the service of manipulative, weepy storylines and insipidly cute character designs. Thus has the Bluth machine trivialized such weighty topics as vivisection and mind-control experimentation (in 1982's The Secret of NIMH) and violent social upheaval (in last year's An American Tail). The new insult, The Land Before Time, establishes that not even the naturalistic grandeur of prehistory is safe from Bluth's forced preciousness. What's agreeable about Stu Krieger's screenplay (from a Judy Freudberg-Tony Geiss story) plays like a knockoff from the Disney filming of Bambi (1942): A young brontosaur named Littlefoot (Gabriel Damon, affecting an abrasive whine for the vocalization) is separated from his mother follwing an attack by a flesh-eating tyrannosaur. The kid - and the main creatures are recog- at REVIEW: FILM The Land Before Time Price's pick: 2 on a scale of 1 to 10 Director: Don Bluth Featuring: The voices of Fred Gwynne, Pat Hingle, Bill Erwin, Burke Byrnes, Helen Shaver, Will Ryan, Gabriel Damon, Judith Barsi, Candy Hutson Rated: G (suitable for all ages, some scary moments) nizably human kids, in a blatant attempt to provoke role-identification by young viewers - unfortunately reaches safety and connects with several chums who (to borrow a line from the press kit) * triumph over numerous life-threatening obstacles" en route to : a land of peace and plenty. Two armored dinosaurs, a flying lizard and a duck-like midget saurian complete the contingent. One is a dolt, another a smart-mouth, another a feisty Pollyanna, another a pathetic sort in need of confidence and nowhere amongst this ensemble can there be found a memorable character to compare with, say Bambi's Thumper and Flower or the Disney Cinderella's Laurel & Hardy-like heroic mice. Main culprits are source-authors Freudberg and Geiss, whose screenplay for An American Tail betrayed a greater influence of television's Littlefoot, left, invites an Anatoasaurus on a misguided adventure over-obvious Sesame Street - for which they had written than of genuine storytelling. The problem recurs in The Land Before Time, which assumes a short attention span on the part of the audience and indulges in close-shave emergency thrills to the exclusion of carefully developed suspense. Marginally saving graces include a resonant narration by Fred Gwynne, impressive backdrop paintings and an occasionally stirring score by James Horner. A too-precious theme song called If We Hold On Together, sung with mock-sincerity by Diana Ross, comes agreeably late in the game and may be missed altogether if you walk out early enough. Kindest remark I can muster about The Land Before Time is that it looks here and there like the stately dinosaur sequence of Disney's Fantasia (1940). Children of several generations- - not to mention adults - have delighted in Fantasia forany number of reasons, including the film's refusal to condescend. The Land Before Time, in speaking down to its audience and assuming that kids are stupid enough to swallow such a load of cutesy-poo hooey, is enough to make you wish these characters had been devoured before their hatching.
