(That Asda Price sticker stays. You don't want to see what's behind it, trust me.)
Last month, when I reviewed the original theatrical The Land Before Time, I concluded that the film isn't anywhere near as good as you probably remember it being and then slipped in some reference to my failure, up until now, to make it through more than eight minutes of its first direct-to-video sequel. Immediately after typing that, I felt something remarkable happening - that is, my prior indifference toward those LBT sequels suddenly started giving way to morbid curiosity. I'd heard so many damning things about the sequels from Bluth devotees over the years - how much of an insult to the original they were, how insanely dragged out the series was, etc - that I began wondering exactly what I'd been missing out on all this time. It occurred to me that, since I have very little lingering nostalgic attachment to the original and essentially no reverence for Bluth as an artist, I could, in theory, make the effort to check out some of those sequels in full without fear of desecrating something dear and sacred to my heart (which is more than I could do for a lot of those DTV Disney sequels they churned out for that icky period between 1994 and 2007, whose mere existence in many cases is enough to give me an aneurysm). At the very least, I was curious to see exactly how they'd attempted to expand on what struck me as a paper-thin and fairly closed-ended story for multiple instalments. So I grabbed hold of the first random LBT sequel I could get my hands on, and here we are.
The first thing I have to say is that upon reading the title, The Land Before Time VIII: The Big Freeze, I was mildly shocked to note that this was movie number eight in the series. As stated, I was aware that the LBT franchise was dragged out for insanely long, but I took that to mean that it got five or six instalments at most, which would have put it on a par with Blue Sky's inexplicably long-lived Ice Age franchise. A quick google search revealed that there are actually fourteen of the damned things in total, the most recent of which was released in 2016, meaning that there could still be a whole more of these to come. Also important to note is that, no matter what issues I might encounter the LBT sequels, I cannot, this time round, pin any of them on Bluth, who had zilch involvement with any of the LBT sequels - in fact, Bluth had no involvement with any sequels made to any of his films (and they are surprisingly plentiful, even when you take out the entire LBT franchise), with the single exception of Bartok The Magnificent (1999), a DTV spin-off to 1998's Anastasia.
Anyway, some context - in 1994, Disney debuted a spin-off TV series based on its then-recent box office smash Aladdin (1992) and made the tactical decision to release the feature-length pilot on video and market it as a sequel under the title The Return of Jafar. Fans who expected something on a par with the original were bitterly disappointed when they got the damned thing home and were greeted with cut-price animation, tuneless musical numbers and a distinct lack of Robin Williams, but by then it was too late. Eisner had their money and was already wise to what a little goldmine he'd just unearthed. Disney's previous attempt at creating a sequel to one of its classics, The Rescuers Down Under (1990), had been a full-scale theatrical release and lavishly animated, but also a box office bomb (to the extent that, when people talk about the Disney Renaissance era, they tend to forget that The Rescuers Down Under was technically a part of it). Why go to all that trouble and risk failure when this considerably cheaper strategy had gotten results? It took a few years before we who bought The Return of Jafar (confession time: I was part of the problem, but it was the only DTV Disney sequel I ever bought, I swear) truly realised what horrors our greediness for more Aladdin had brought upon Disney's legacy. The fall-out was so powerful and so toxic that it took until 2007 for someone (Lasseter) to put their foot down and say "Jesus Christ, people, enough!" If there's a silver living to Disney's sequel plague, it's the infinite amount of petty amusement I get from contemplating that all of the films from the Renaissance era received sequels/midquels except Hercules (save The Rescuers Down Under, which was itself a sequel), which might say something about how well-regarded that film is behind the scenes at Disney. The Fox and The Hound was deemed worthy of one of these things but not Hercules. Come on, that's pretty hilarious.
I would have assumed that the success of The Return of Jafar was what inspired Universal Cartoon Studios to get aboard the DTV gravy train and start churning out sequels to The Land Before Time - however, another google search revealed that the first sequel, The Land Before Time II: The Great Valley Adventure, entered production in 1993 and was released in late 1994, suggesting that it was all just a great coincidence that we happened to get two separate bouts of sequelitis from two studios at once. Over the years, Universal Cartoon Studios would attempt to branch out a little, giving us the odd DTV sequel to An American Tail, Balto and, in one particularly barrel-scraping example, Hanna Barbera's 1973 adaptation of Charlotte's Web (the title character is already dead, for eff's sake), but The Land Before Time is where the bulk of their bread and butter was sourced, and they stuck with it for as long as the DTV gravy train was running. When DTV sequels fell out fashion with Disney in 2007, Universal Cartoon Studios also looked to be calling it quits, but they kept LBT going as a TV series for a further year, and recently released a new LBT sequel in 2016 (as Universal Animation Studios). These dinosaurs just refuse to go extinct.
Here's the Universal Cartoon Studios logo:
I'm no fan of the sugar-cereal coloured lettering used on "Cartoon Studios" (way too kiddish), but the cartoon plane is innocuous enough, I suppose.
The copy I've gotten hold of is the UK VHS of The Land Before Time VIII: The Big Freeze distributed by Universal Pictures (UK) Ltd. The only trailer attached to this release is for the 20th anniversary "update" of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial that came out in 2002. Basically, this was Spielberg's attempt to give his iconic sci-fi the treatment that Lucas did with the 20th anniversary Special Edition of Star Wars, with added scenes and digitally enhanced effects, only he struggled to kick up even a fraction of the interest. The only thing that anyone seemed to notice or comment on was that the bike sequence had been modified to replace the cops' guns with walkie-talkies, which earned Spielberg enough derision for a lampooning on South Park, but nothing near the amount of heated fervor as having Greedo shoot first. My understanding is that Spielberg has denounced this version and now tells people to stick with the original. Good to know that he's not as fanatical as Lucas.
The Big Freeze opens with a narrator (John Ingle) explaining that dinosaurs walked the Earth long before humans and were a pretty diverse bunch. Ingle's narration isn't anywhere near as annoying and intrusive as Pat Hingle's in the original film (for one, we don't hear another peep out of him until the very end), but given that we're already so far into the series, I find it a bit ominous that they apparently still feel the need to open by explaining to us what a dinosaur was. It doesn't strike me as a good indication of how highly they estimate their viewers' intelligence.
Ducky (now voiced by Aria Curzon) is in a funk with her adopted stegosaurus brother Spike (Rob Paulsen) because his snoring is keeping her awake at night, and Cera (Anndi McAfee) advises her (in song form!) to keep nursing that grudge until things go her way. Meanwhile, a herd of nomadic spike tails has taken up residence in the Great Valley and Spike, feeling unwanted and excluded by Ducky, grows close to a young male named Tippy (Jeremy Suarez) and his mother (Susan Krebs). When the Valley is hit by heavy snowfall for the first time in anybody's living memory, the spike tail herd decide to move on in search of better grazing grounds and Spike is torn between whether to follow his own kind or to stay with his adopted saurolophus family. Ducky, bitterly jealous and hurt that Spike could even consider leaving them, advises him to go, but later realises how much she misses Spike and decides to go after him and convince him to return. When Cera, Littlefoot (Thomas Dekker) and Petrie (Jeff Bennett) get wise to what Ducky is up to, they decide to follow to ensure that no harm comes to either of their wayward friends. Hence, we get endless footage of the gang trekking through raging blizzards which the sensible part of my brain insists would kill a cold-blooded animal in seconds. Then I remind myself that Petrie miraculously survived a 50ft plunge whilst sandwiched between a T-Rex and a boulder in the original film, and suddenly I'm less inclined to be picky with the sequel over "realism".
From the outset, you'd be forgiven for assuming that this was going to be a story focusing on the relationship between Ducky and Spike, and on Spike wanting to understand more about his identity and heritage as a "spike tail". As a premise I'd say that that actually has potential. Spike was easily the most one dimensional of the group in the original - a mute, ravenous doofus and nothing more - yet his backstory is so poignant when you think about it. He was on his own before he even hatched and he's the only one who in the end was not reunited with any of his family at the Great Valley. Since he was taken in and raised by a family of another species (one leading a completely different lifestyle to the one he's naturally built for), there's an interesting scenario to be gleaned from Spike twigging that he's different to his siblings and feeling curious but also conflicted when he finally gets the opportunity to connect with his own kind. The eventual outcome might be totally predictable - obviously, Spike is going to learn that his "real" family is with Ducky and the other saurolophus because what makes a "family" is determined by so much more than just genetics and physical resemblance, and you won't be terribly gobsmacked to learn that this is indeed where The Big Freeze ends up taking things - but it is one viable way I could see them expanding on the set-up from the original film.
Unfortunately, surprisingly little of The Big Freeze is actually devoted to Spike and his curiosity about other spike tails, and once he makes the decision to leave the Valley his story thread trails off and he all but disappears from the movie altogether - it is, in effect, a smokescreen to the real story, which is about Littlefoot and his relationship with Mr Thicknose (Robert Guillaume), an elderly pachyrhinosaurus who functions as a kind of schoolteacher to the children of the Valley. Thicknose is universally respected by the adult dinosaurs due to his extensive knowledge about the world outside the Valley and is very defensive of that reputation - as such, he doesn't take kindly to anything which might be perceived as undermining his authority, and Littlefoot's inquisitive nature immediately rubs him the wrong way. Later, Thicknose falls out of favour with the adults when he fails to warn them about the possibility of snowfall and its potentially devastating effects on their food sources, and Cera's father (Ingle again) proposes stripping him of his position as local educator. A dejected Thicknose catches Littlefoot, Cera and Petrie attempting to sneak out of the Valley and insists on accompanying them, giving Littlefoot the opportunity to bond with his old adversary and gain some understanding of his insecurities. It's a well-intentioned story with a sweet, thoughtful moral about the basic human (or dinosaur, as it were) need to be respected and how easy it is to get hung up on wanting others to admire you. Problem is that it's just so arbitrarily connected to the plot about Spike; one gets the impression that the writers conceived the two narrative threads as independent stories and then pasted them together when neither proved meaty enough to sustain a full-length feature on their own. Even then, getting it to the 75 minute mark is an uphill struggle - I'd say that each narrative has just about enough material to sustain a 22 minute TV episode without getting too dull (on the basis of this film, I actually wonder if The Land Before Time might have lent itself better to a spin-off TV series right from the start - these are, by and large, TV plots which have been stretched to their absolute limit). Unsurprisingly, we get a lot of pointless fluff, notably a tedious, overly long sequence in which the dinosaurs bombard one another with snowballs. Ultimately, it's a testament to just how poorly-integrated the two threads are that they don't even mesh into a common resolution. Spike's storyline is treated as a mere afterthought, with him just wandering back to rejoin the others at the end of the film, and Ducky's mother (Tress MacNeille) proving her maternal mettle by saving his life when he randomly gets knocked into water, thus reaffirming his place among the saurolophus clan. Essentially nothing comes of his friendship with Tippy and his mother, whom we barely get to know as characters; they were simply a plot device to motivate the gang to leave the Valley and wander around in the snow for a while. Also, I'm not totally convinced that Spike actually did choose to be with the saurolophus so much as the decision was made for him; he happened to bump into the others while searching for food, then Ducky's mother is declared his "real family" because she was the best equipped to save him and wasn't heartless enough to let him drown. Then again, I found the ending to be a bit glib in general - Ingle's narrator assures us that eventually the snow problem went away by itself and we never do learn how things worked out for Mr Thicknose.
Also of note is that Ducky is here a lot more tolerable than she was in the original film, whereas Petrie seems to have gotten a heck of a lot more inane. Seriously, if any character has been royally screwed over in the transition from the original theatrical feature to the DTV sequels, it's Petrie, who's clearly been whacked pretty hard by an idiot stick since arriving at the Great Valley. Petrie wasn't a dumb character in the original. He was nervous, uptight and a little hung up on the fact that he wasn't able to fly, but certainly not stupid. Here, he's so unembarrassed by his decreased IQ that he flat-out states, at one point, "Me believe you...but then me believe anything!" Which leads me onto my second contention with DTV sequel-Petrie - in the original, Petrie had a quirky, grammatically incorrect manner of speaking (almost as if English wasn't his first language) which here has been boiled down to a very basic tendency to substitute "I" with "Me", presumably to make him sound more dense (it also gives his character more of a Jar Jar Binks vibe, as if you needed anything else about him to set your teeth on edge). Ducky, on the other hand, retains some of her infantile speech mannerisms but is here played with a notch more restraint than when she was voiced by Judith Barsi (once again, I wish to emphasise that my dislike of Barsi's Ducky does not translate into dislike or insensitivity toward Barsi herself - what happened to her was appalling). She's less in your face with her cutesiness, and I like her the better for it.
On the whole, The Big Freeze has no pretensions about being aimed anyone but the very smallest of children, and that will certainly be an issue for anyone who reveres the original for being a particularly dark, intense and gritty slice of 1980s animation. Personally, I've always found Bluth's so-called edginess as a film-maker to be severely overrated (see my comments in my previous LBT review about expired milk and frosted cereal), but there's no denying that the peril in the original film felt leagues more genuine than it does here. A T-Rex makes an appearance in this film too, but it's hard to imagine this one successfully killing one of the protagonist's parents as happened with Sharptooth in the original (he gets beaten by a giant snowball, for eff's sake). The sequels also deviate from the original by adding in a musical element (prompted, presumably, by the Disney Renaissance putting animated musicals in vogue again), and I'm aware that this tends to be a real sticking point for Bluth devotees. The Big Freeze has three - an ode to the virtues of being angry, performed by Cera, a melancholic song about family performed by Ducky's mother and the main cast and a song by Mr Thicknose which sums up the moral of his arc. I'd describe them all as harmless fluff - they're decidedly kid-orientated and utterly disposable, but at the very least I find them more tolerable than the musical numbers from any of Bluth's 1990s output that isn't Anastasia (try Youtubing some of the songs from The Pebble and The Penguin. Just kidding - don't). Incidentally, I've read at least one review of The Big Freeze suggesting that Cera's song might give children the wrong message, since it's all about savouring your anger, throwing tantrums and bearing grudges until you get what you what want, ie: a message discounted by the movie's overall moral, but then very young children are less likely to pay attention to such things and more likely to just rewind and watch the songs over and over. In fairness, though, it's probably no worse than The Lion King's "Hakuna Matata" in that regard.
In the end I walk away more or less indifferent to The Big Freeze. It doesn't inspire anything close to the searing contempt that I have for DTV Disney sequels like The Lion King II: Simba's Pride and The Little Mermaid II: Return To The Sea, presumably because I don't regard the original as being anything too magnificent in the first place, but I was pretty hard-pressed to keep my eyes open throughout. If you're an admirer of Bluth and consider him to be one the great misunderstood geniuses of American animation, then it's a safe bet that you'll loathe and resent this film with every fibre of your being, and I do not recommend you even giving it a second thought. Myself, it neither pleasantly surprised me nor satisfied my immense gluttony for punishment. The Big Freeze is quite content in being undemanding fluff for the under-5s and all in all it won't do much harm to them. On the other hand, it's such a lacklustre and slow-moving film that I'm not convinced that even the tots are going to have an infinite amount of patience for it. My morbid curiosity in checking out a few more entries in the LBT series hasn't waned, although I sincerely hope that, for better or for worse, The Big Freeze doesn't represent it at the peak of its liveliness.
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