Animated 'Land' looks like a monster hit By Anne Stephenson Special for The Arizona Republic I will assume, since you are reading this review, that you are older than 6. I'll go one step further and assume that you might be a parent, one of a sorry group of people who are worn down during the long months between Disney releases by too many hours in the darkness watching pastel ponies, pudgy Care Bears and chatty little Rainbow Brites. You probably suffer from a case of Parental Cinematic Consumer Syndrome, which means you follow your child meekly from the theater to the nearest toyshop to stock up on insipid products based on stupid characters in the crummy movies you've just seen. Or maybe you have sworn off theaters, hoping to entertain your kids with classics on your VCR. But how many times can anyone even a 5-year-old watch Lady and the Tramp? Just when you think animated movies for children have become a triumph of marketing over imagination, along comes Don Bluth to make you think again. Last year he brought us An American Tail, an OK movie for kids that was marginally satisfying for adults. Now he has ironed out the wrinkles, polished the animation eels and created The Land Before Time, a film that will please kids and parents alike. Here is why: The Land Before Time is short. It ends a good 30 minutes before most films of its kind, so it will not strain the attention span of a child, nor will it bore an adult. tThe movie exploits a powerful preschool phenomenon dinosaur mania and will appeal to a generation of children who learned to say "Tyrannosaurus rex" before they learned to live without diapers. The animation is great The adult ' 1 ma r ft""" JSmi : W- . .. .w - i ,,,.,, - TM.B "Wt,..l.....J Universal City Studios Inc. The Land Before Time features a baby brontosaurus named Littlefoot and his anthropomorphic playmates, who set out together on an adventure. dinosaurs have a lumbering, realistic gait, and the babies are, if not cuddly, at least clumsy and cute. Yes, there it is the C-word. This is not a dramatic dinosaur saga like the wonderful segment in Disney's classic Fantasia. But it is for young kids, after all, so maybe there's room for some soft touches. At least the dinosaurs don't sing like the mice did in An American Tail. When I saw that movie last year, several of those little mice reminded me of children I knew. That is true here as well, and there is something magical about that transference of human traits to such unhuman creatures. There is one dinosaur, MOVIE REVIEW The Land Before Time tick . A Universal Pictures film produced and ; directed by Don Bluth; screenplay by Stu Krieger from a story by Judy Freudberg and Tony Geiss; music by James Horner. Animated. Rated: G Excellent Good Fair Poor a crabby little triceratops named Cera, who is so familiar, so like a cantankerous little girl, that by the end of the film the collar of her misshapen head seems like a reptilian version of pigtails. The story of The Land Before Time is simple. Five young dinosaurs, led by a brontosaurus named Littlefoot, try to reach safety after an earthquake has scattered their families and made them vulnerable to the terrible Tyrannosaurus rex. Littlefoot's mother dies soon after the quake, but that is the only sad part of the movie. T-rex is scary in just the right doses, and the little reptiles are funny and brave as they fall asleep huddled together against the prehistoric night. I saw this movie with two 6-year-old girls. One of them, a weeper from way back, cried when Littlefoot's mother died, then watched the rest of the film with the fierce loyalty of someone who has been deeply moved. The other child, who has little tolerance for television and is easily distracted from anything boring, sat still until the credits rolled. They loved it, they told me as we left the theater. Then they pulled me through the shopping mall to a store where, on the very day the film opened in Phoenix, we could buy clothing, suspenders and stuffed toys based on the characters from The Land Before Time. I guess it's the wave of the future.
