A Veritable Herd of Animated Dinosaurs!

As you may have guessed, I like dinosaurs a lot.  I like animation a lot.  And I love animated dinosaurs.  So the past couple of weeks have been awesome in that respect.  Firstly, the first episode of David James Armsby's "Dinosauria" is out and it is beautiful!

Armsby also posted this incredible making-of video and I don't know what impresses me more: the cancelled "All Days" series, the sculpture, or the "Dinosauria" series scrapbook.

And there's a teaser for the upcoming second episode.  Baby Troodons!  Fuzzy Pachyrhinosaurs!

And on top of all this, Dr. Mark Witton joined the "Fantasy/Animation Podcast" for an episode about "The Land Before Time", where they discuss the strangely intertwined history of dinosaurs and animation and the film's place in the Dinosaur Renaissance.

-----

Art of the Day!

I can't believe it's already the penultimate day of Sci-Art September.  What a great time!  I shared a lot of mostly paleoart and hopped on the "Dinosauria" fanart train:

Thoughts - But Also Mostly Sketches - From TetZoom 2021

So TetZoom 2021, which occurred about a week ago and ran all day and into the night, was an absolute blast!  This was the second ever TetZoo Convention I've ever been able to attend and I really really hope they keep the online/livestream portion of the show.  Handy Sketchbook on my knee, I took a lot of notes on the presentations and here they are, though considerably cleaned up: 

One of the highlights of the show was getting to attend the Paleoart Workshop, which I wisely snapped up tickets for as soon as I could.  And so I drew this beautiful Kronosaurus along with our teacher Mark Witton.  What an awesome experience!

On the Deleted Scenes from "The Land Before Time"

 I promised you animation and dinosaurs, didn't I?

That nearly a million dollars worth of content was deleted from the original "Land Before Time" is one of the greatest legends of that small but significant border town between paleoart and animation where I live.  Exactly what that content would have looked like was a big mystery, but this nice brief documentary from the channel Scribbles to Screens clears quite a lot up.  And while it does end on a sad note of we're probably never going to see the actual footage for ourselves, there's a lot of excellent rare animation art that has been found, and it is wonderful to see.  (A highlight is the concept art of the Oasis scene, where the Crown-Heads turn out to be victims of a Great Nomenclature Mixup.  A very long time ago, for some reason, Troodon was first described as a Pachycephalosaur.  And so the Crown-Heads are Pachycephalosaurs... with distinctive large talons.)  We also get a nice overview of the history of Don Bluth and his studio, which is always fun to see.

-----

Draw Dinovember Day 11 - So, Don Bluth Has a Kickstarter...

It's to fund a pitch for a hand-drawn "Dragon's Lair" movie.  I'm not entirely sure how to feel about this, but at least you're getting more for your donation now than you would have about a week ago.

Anyhow, here are some "Land Before Time" characters from memory.

In Which Trish *Finally* Gets a Look at 3/4ths of "Dinosaur Revolution"!

Yes, I finally saw it.  Out of the kindness of the YouTube elves, since there is not one scrap of evidence that this miniseries will be available in it's original televised form on DVD in America anytime soon.  And with the second episode completely missing, that single episode having been deleted by Discovery Networks (because content providers cracking down on the internet know no logic).  So here are my thoughts, well over a year after anyone could possibly care!  Huzzah and Happy New Year!

Bit of background, first.  The story of "Dinosaur Revolution" (also known by the less-confounding title, "Reign of the Dinosaurs") begins several years ago when a teaser image of concept art appeared on the Internet.  (This was occasionally credited to Pixar, possibly having been conflated with contemporary teaser art from "The Good Dinosaur".)  At the time, we were given sky-high promises about the upcoming miniseries.  Most exciting among these were the promise that this would be a narrative dinosaur film with no dialogue or vocal narration at all, that the dinosaurs would be the most scientifically accurate animals to date, and that noted paleoartists and animators would be contributing to the project.  It was not referred to as a serious documentary, but would instead be a series of short animated vignettes of life in the Mesozoic.  One of the earliest previews shows what they initially intended for the series.

In short, this sounded like the dinosaur animation that I'd been longing for since, like, forever.  And that I'm still longing for because "Dinosaur Revolution" isn't it.

But it comes really damn close to it.  A lot of what's bad about the miniseries has been blamed on executive meddling, so let's tackle the not-so-good parts of "Dinosaur Revolution" first.

There are, to be sure, segments with excellent animation.  There are also segments with very sloppy animation, with "floaty" physics and wonky walk-cycles, and the inconsistency can get jarring.  I didn't have as much of a problem with the more stylized aspects of the series that most people did, looking back at reviews of the series from the time.  That said, there were a couple of scenes that had me thinking, "really?"  Most of them have to do with the non-dinosaur characters, like the weirdly dolphin-like Mosasaur and the pterosaur mother with her babies...  Hey, you know that scene in "The Land Before Time" with the cute baby pterosaurs going after the one berry?  There's a scene in "Dinosaur Revolution" that is the exact diametric opposite of it. <8(

The narration is oftentimes just awful, sounding exactly like what you'd imagine the end-result of a long string of bad decisions from wimpy execs would.  It just keeps showing up again and again, stating the stunningly obvious, and getting in the way right when I was most enthralled with the visuals.

Then you have the segments where Coachella Tupac hologram scientists talk about *sort-of* sciencey-stuff in a very fake looking science lab set.  Oh dear, these were indeed very silly.  Now, it's always fun to have Scott Sampson talk about dinosaurs in a television show, and I like how they interviewed Scott Hartman.  It would have been very nice to have the show's contributors talk about their reasoning behind the animated sequences after each episode.  Apparently, this was the original plan, but the network caved and decided to throw the interviews randomly in during the show itself.  Like the narration, these segments just interrupt the dinosaurs we're here to see.

There's also that damned strange ending.  Spoilertext: You cry for the mother Troodon desperately trying to save her last egg. But then, there is flash-forward to modern times with some incredibly sh*ttily animated birds to show that all is well and some Maniraptors made it! Man, if they had just stopped there it'd be fine. But they end on a very, very different note - and you cry again.

The other big point of contention people had with "Dinosaur Revolution" has to do with the tone.  Discovery shot itself in the foot advertising this as a straight, serious documentary.  Indeed, it feels as though they took the animated segments, which are as a whole essentially like a more rigorously accurate original "The Land Before Time", and tried to force them into a dead-serious science documentary by adding the narration and interview segments.  The end result is jarring, to say the least.

So, basically, the main criticisms I have with "Dinosaur Revolution" have to do with what it isn't, and what the networks tried to force it to be.  Ignoring all that, there is a lot to love in the miniseries.

First off, these animated dinosaurs look absolutely fantastic.  I dare say they may be the most believable CGI creatures this side of "District 9" - when the animation is at it's best, at least.  I love how they're allowed to look and behave much stranger then we're used to seeing in this kind of CGI dinosaur series.  It's not always realistic but it's believable, and that's what counts.

Most significantly, in many ways, "Dinosaur Revolution" reminded me of the "a paleoartist is going to inevitably be wrong about what dinosaurs really looked like anyway, so why be wrong and boring?" philosophy of Brian Engh's astonishing Sauroposeidon illustration.  Or the illustrations in All Yesterdays, come to think of it.  It's mind-blowing at times, and I hope the re-edit of the miniseries (with the facepalm-worthy title, "Dinotasia") is closer to the original vision for the series.

Overall, what I liked in "Dinosaur Revolution", I liked a lot.  I'll try to ignore the rest. 

-----

Sketch of the Day!  The very first entry in Sketch of the Day 2013!  A pretty Troll bride-to-be and the difference between the "Jurassic Park" and "Dinosaur Revolution" T. rexes.

Dinosaur Guts, Dinosaur Butts - Let's read the Eyewitness Visual Dictionary of Dinosaurs!

Ah, Eyewitness Books. The science, nature, and history library that saved many a kid my age while writing reports for school. Their format has been much-imitated, even to the point that part of me could argue that, in many ways, Eyewitness ruined the world of nonfiction children's books. For ages and ages afterwards, the default "style" for such books was, "stark white background, photographs of objects related to the subject, and labels. Labels everywhere." You can see the roots of the "Whatever"-Ology books and their various and sundry rip-offs there.

Eyewitness' Dinosaur editions are perhaps the best-loved out of the whole series. They took the then-unusual approach of using models to depict the dinosaurs. All the models were made by John Holmes, Roby Braun, Graham High, and Jeremy Hunt. The photography was by Andy Crawford, and the drawings by John Temperton and Graham Rosewarne. The book was published in 1993 by Dorling Kindersley, Inc.

The dinosaur models were very up-to-date for their time, but maybe have not aged well. And, sadly, they are each attended by a swarm of labels.



And a few of them depict the dinosaurs from the inside-out. Lord knows why, especially since the form and function of internal anatomy isn't really the focus of the book and is never elaborated upon. And mind you, this was all done before we found Leonardo so a lot of what you see inside this Gallimimus is based on educated guessing.



Now, the Eyewitness approach is nifty but I do recall having a book by them specifically about hadrosaurs, and most of the "illustrations" were just this model photographed from different angles. Yeah.



I am willing to admit that I may be a little obsessed with Deinocheirus' crazy-long arms...



And here's the hand of Baryonyx. You know, if it were out of context and I didn't know much about theropod anatomy, I might assume this was a maniraptor foot and large talon too. This explains some things.



Speaking of maniraptors, here's a familiar face. 80's kids, how sick are you of this guy. (It's Dale Russel's rather infamous model of Troodon, for those who don't recognize it.)



And here is a very strange bust of an oviraptor. I'm gonna say it. I'm gonna say it and you can't stop me. Here we go.

Scaly raptors look stupid.

They do. Look at this thing and the Russel!Troodon and try to argue it. And keep this in mind for one of next week's books...

----

Additionally, CHUD.com reviewed "The Land Before Time" as part of it's Childhood's End series (revisiting movies the writers watched as children but hadn't seen in over a decade). If nothing else, it finally explains the title.

Additionally additionally, IndieWire has a better still of the dinosaur who shows up in the "Tree of Life" poster. I may need to do a longer post about him later...

Additionally additionally additionally, I just got some more retro dinosaur books from the library, so Retro Paleoart "Month" may go on for a week or so into May. Which is good, as that will give me time to recover from Comicon. (Which is in just a week OMG!!!)

---

Art of the Day!

I should probably save this for my review of "Pokemon: White", since it's one of the best things in the game (though this looked an awful lot better in my head):

"The Secret of Kells"

It is all too rare these days to see an animated film that does not look like anything else out there. It is far, far rarer to find an animated film that reminds you of why you fell in love with animation in the first place.

I am happy to report, with my clumsy typing fingers trying to be coherent at way, way too early in the morning, that "The Secret of Kells" is such a movie on both counts. It is not only one of the most truly unique animated films from the past decade, it also puts my faith back into the medium.

A surprise nomination for Best Animated Feature (which was full of good contenders this year: "Up", "The Princess and the Frog", "Fantastic Mr. Fox", "Coraline") in the 2010 Academy Awards, "Kells" is somewhat reminiscent of "The Secret of Roan Inish". Both films successfully achieve the "incredible legendary fantastical things co-exist with day-to-day mundane things, just go with it" feel that is so distinctive to Irish folklore. (To the point where a few reviewers found the combination of a Catholic monastery and a forest full of pre-Christian mythical creatures a little off-putting. Whatever, dude. I was totally cool with it. Maybe you have to be Irish to get it?)

The film is the result of a decade-long labor of love. I highly recommend watching the director's presentation in the special features. He shows all the character and production design drawings he could find, parts of the film's storyboards and "color script" (small paintings that track how the use of color in animation can enhance the mood of the story throughout the film, ie violent reds during the barbarian raids, peaceful greens during the scenes in Aisling's forest), pages from the "series bible" (the production was spread over several countries --some of which happily represented themselves by the other refugee monks at Kells in the film-- so a large collection of notes detailing the style of the film was essential), and lists several of his favorite works of animation that inspired the look of the film. There are visual nods to everything from ancient Irish art to "Samurai Jack" and "Okami". And the film is extremely intelligent as well; the creators show that they really did their research (leave it to TV Tropes to seek out all the references.)

"Secret of Kells" is right up there with "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" and "Blade Runner" (and "Land Before Time", of course) as one of the most exceptionally beautiful films I have ever seen. There is a sequence late in the film that is such a stunning triumph of hand-drawn animation that you wonder if this scene alone is what they spent most of those ten years upon.

At this point, I should really hopefully just be able to say, "Secret of Kells" is wonderful and you should watch it. Since it is available on Netflix instant watch, you should watch it right now. Like, right now. Like, instead of reading me struggling to express my love for it in words, right now.

----

Pink Dinosaur of the Day! Technically, I hit the fifteenth pink dinosaur a while before this guy, but I couldn't resist:

Let's read MORE Old Dinosaur Books!

Few things are as much fun as visiting a relatively remote branch of your city library that you have not visited since childhood, and finding out that they haven't done much "weeding" since you were last there:



Oh, I had the hardest time leaving some of these. (LOL at the book at the bottom.) I've noticed there are a few blogs and other websites that have written about vintage paleoart lately. Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs often has a post about vintage dinosaur art, and has a corresponding Flickr group. Tetrapod Zoology occasionally has a neat feature about this subject as well. I stumbled upon a real treasure trove here, so I am going to have to throw my hat into the ring. Don't know if September will end up being Hilariously Outdated Paleoart Month, but anyway...

We'll start with one of the Rourke Prehistoric Animal Books. They were a library of books published circa 1984 by Rourke Enterprises, Inc. in Vero Beach, Florida. Each one focused on a different species. Usually they told of a day in the animal's life, from that animal's point of view. They were a staple of every 80's library for a long time.



Here's the title page, listing all the books from this series (there were several series within the series). I picked Archaeopteryx (sic) because I figured it would have the most comedic potential. I love the irony of that HMNH/"Jurassic Park"-style Deinonychus running beneath our heroine... (Also notable: That ain't no Ankylosaurus.) I am also kind of in love with this picture from later in the book:



Yeah... not much I can add to this.Archeopteryx is depicted with pretty wonky hand and leg anatomy throughout the book, so get used to it. Also, she has that classic "lizardbird" head and face that has only fallen out of favor in paleoart very recently. And, of course, being the only animal in the world with feathers at the time, Archy has to be the only animal allowed to be colorful too.

Over at DeviantArt, Chasmosaur immediately dubbed my "too far in the opposite direction" feathered dinosaur in "PSA Addendum" a "Sparkleraptor". And I had a good laugh over that -- and then I looked at old illustrations of Archeopteryx and realized that this is not a new thing. Almost across the board all the "nekkid" dinosaurs are the lovely shades of Crap Brown, Diarrhea Green, Intestinal Distress Puce -- while Archeopteryx looks like she wandered off the set of "Priscilla, Queen of the Desert". (By the way, if you do not know what a "sparkle-animal" is... you're probably better off.)

Remember how Dinosaurs Discovered included a weird stegosaurus with horizontal plates along with more traditional-looking stegosaurs? This book has it's cake and eats it in a similar way. Here's where it stands on the infamous "Ground Up"/"Trees Down" issue:





Not much I can add to this either. There's a brief section in the back of the book explaining some of the stuff in the main part, and they state that they wanted to show both theories. (For those of you who aren't Ornithologists, there is a lot of wank over whether the first birds started flying by wing-assisted leaping from the ground, or by aiming for the ground and missing. This is all operating under the assumption that "probably a combination of both, it depends on the particular early bird" is not an option.)

The authors also state with assertion that Archy "is really a reptile that is halfway through evolving into a bird".

I... I...

(For the non-Ornithologists, I can think of at least three or four things wrong with that old chestnut that pops up in so many dinosaur books at the time. For one thing, evolution does not work like in "Pokemon". For another, if Archeopteryx is a reptile, you and I might as well be classified as reptiles. And so on...)



The book ends with Archeopteryx actually looking more like a viable animal in her own right rather than a horrible freakish lizard-thing trapped between evolutionary levels. And she gets the company of another Kiss-guanodon too!

-----

Art of the Day! Here are some reptiles that have achieved their final evolutionary forms! (Yup. that's another thing I couldn't type without cringing.)

The big damn "Land Before Time" nostalgia post!

First off, this one's going to be a little picture heavy. And you may want to read this old post before we begin, as many of it's points still stand.

Also, just because this showed up again:



I had to see what it was all about. Clicking that link leads to a short film that shows kids how to use a DVD remote and eventually ends with this image:



Yeah...

In the last post I mentioned two important things that I didn't have the space to expand on: That "The Land Before Time" was the first movie I ever became a hopeless fangirl for and that it was The Movie That Changed My Life.

Completely Sealed Young Trishie's Fate, more like it. "The Land Before Time" is the one movie, more than any other, that made me want to be an animator. Seriously. Once I saw this, there was no other imaginable career path. I remember reading some little blurb about the Sullivan/Bluth studio as a little kid and making my one and only ever Life's Plan to get over there and work for them when I grew up. There's a small, but very (VERY) vocal part of me that still wants to work there.

(And Trish lets out the deepest, most heart-rending sigh you could ever imagine...)

Now that that serious bummer is out of the way (for YOU; I have to live with it) let me share some of the evidence and memories of my fandom. Gotta start out with another serious bummer: Try to imagine what all the cool kids in my middle school were writing about when they did their inevitable "My Favorite Movie" essays. Now imagine how much fun it was to run to the defense of some seventy-minute long dinosaur cartoon. Yeah.

I'll start with these weird wall decorations that I chanced to find ages and ages ago in a long-extinct hardware store. For some reason bare walls were abhorrent to the mind of an 80's kid, and these oversize stickers were there to please. Sadly, they did not come off in one piece. Sorry for the blurryness in some of these.











I saved Petrie for last because of a weird little phenomenon I've noticed over the years: no two tie-in products agree what color scheme he is. (I suggest you take my word for it instead of doing a Google Image search. "Petrie" turns up some weird sh*t.) Officially, he's the cruddy orange that seemed to be the default colors for Pterosaurs in the 80's, but in the above wall art and the Pizza Hut party supplies and the hand puppets below, he's practically a Sparkledactyl.

So about those damn hand puppets:



I have yet to meet a person of around my age who never owned one of these little monstrosities. Apparently, they were only a buck at the time so who could resist?

There was a glaring omission from the "Land Before Time" DVD I watched last night and it ain't the missing footage (well, OK, that too). Comment below if you have this stupid commercial well drilled into the tooth of your memory:



I don't recall ever having a Pizza Hut birthday party during this time period, but boy did we go there a lot. Our local Pizza Hut hung stuffed animals of the main cast from the ceiling and each time we ate there, I seethed with envy. 

You see, those toys were J.C. Penny exclusives and there wasn’t a J.C. Penny store for miles. Whose genius marketing idea was that? I think there was a coloring contest where Pizza Hut would award one of the stuffed toys as a prize. I very definitely remember getting a picture of Littlefoot to color in. Littlefoot, just to remind you, is brown. The picture came with a sealed packet of crayons: red, yellow, blue, and green.

  Chain restaurants hate children and want them to be properly disillusioned by the age of ten.

  Anyway, if I couldn’t have the stuffed animals, the puppets were a... decent... substitute. (Decent as in off-model, awkwardly designed, and failing utterly at fitting on a human hand.) Honestly, give-away toys are like a giant conspiracy against you when you are about nine or ten and want a complete set. (See also all the trauma caused by McDonalds’ Happy Meals.) But as you can see, eventually I got my complete set. Sharptooth and everyone. Yard sales are awesome. Turns out these aren't so hard to find on eBay and neither are the 1988 "Land Before Time" plushes. (Said plushes really aren't that great looking and not really worth it IMO.)  

Funny coda: I passed by a stuffed animal Littlefoot in Ocean State Job Lot a while ago, and the irony of blithely ignoring something I would have given my eyeteeth for as a little kid did not escape me. 

I guess what I really really longed for was more "Land Before Time". As I said, the film is really short. I would have to wait years and years for my foolish little ten-year-old wish to be fulfilled in pretty much the worst way imaginable (sorry to address the sauropod in the room like that). Ah, but there was something to sate us dinosaur animation geeks (at least until "Jurassic Park" but we had no idea back then.) And I kind of want to slap my younger self for being so desperate for animated dinosaurs that she'd voluntarily watch this thing right here:



  This little slice of shameless cash-grabbing is "Dink the Little Dinosaur". And I call it shameless because even as a kid, I knew this was a blatant rip off the popularity of "Land Before Time". They're not even subtle about it, really. It's kind of hilarious/sad that the basic plots were almost recycled by the "Land Before Time" series.  

The DVD, whatever edition Netflix sent me, wasn't as terrible as I feared. The print looks pretty clean. As usual, there are no decent special features for older fans, though this one did silence all my years of fan speculation:  



Here's the crazy thing: all of the text in the special features is read out loud for you. I can't tell you how annoying that is. 

I wish Universal knew that there was an audience out there for a good anniversary edition of "Land Before Time" and, while we're dreaming, "An American Tail" made with Don Bluth's input. Give us a letterboxed format and a cleaned-up soundtrack. Give us some kind of behind-the-scenes stuff. Hell, really throw us a bone and let us know what the missing "Land Before Time" footage was all about! 

This last thing is a bit of a point of contention for me. First off, I remember having two little paperback books that contained scenes that aren't in the final cut of the movie. One of them is a scene that enforces the "species-ism is bad" theme when the gang meets two different genre of hadrosaur who refuse to share the food and water they're hording with each-other; in a surprising moment of character development, it is Cera who tells them off. The other is far, far more interesting: it shows Littlefoot arriving at the Great Valley by himself, then backtracking to rescue his friends. It's clear where these scenes were rearranged in the final cut. Secondly, in the old Memory Lane message boards (it's very meta, the fact that they could be featured in a modern-day equivalent of Memory Lane), there was a poster who claimed to have a copy of the original storyboards and promised to send us scans of the missing scenes. I am still very bitter that this never happened.

  I guess it's clear by now that where most kids in my peer group had "The Little Mermaid", I had "The Land Before Time". I'm sorry if this nostalgia binge was too much for some readers, but this movie means a lot to me. 

Also, I might as well write two long posts on "The Land Before Time", because I'm looking at my Netflix queue, and it's pretty much straight downhill from here. 

 ---- 

"Art of the Day"!  Here are some pop culture dinosaurs. Click for big:

 

Don Bluth Month: They have a word for "star" but not for "leaf"? Thoughts on "The Land Before Time"

First, hilarity from Netflix (I regret not sharing more of these. Sometimes I wonder just what movie they watched):



This is going to be another hard movie to write about. You see, while "The Secret of N.I.M.H." is my favorite movie of all time, "The Land Before Time" is no less than The Movie That Changed My Life. It's going to be hard to talk about it subjectively, as it was my favorite childhood movie. I may even have to have this stretch over two posts. I have a LOT to say about "LBT".

Here we have Don Bluth and Steven Spielberg re-teaming after "An American Tail". This time, they brought a third friend along. And I am just going to direct you to Jollyjack's lovely one-panel comic over at DeviantArt, which needs no further comment really.

There is a minimum of "Lucasness" in this film, fortunately. Though watching it again for the first time in ages, there's one thing that strikes me about "The Land Before Time" and it strikes me hard: It's *SHORT*. I mean, it's really short. It's barely an hour long and feels like it's over before you know it. This ends up working to the movie's advantage: there's simply no room to f*** anything up.

OK, seriously. The short, short running time of "The Land Before Time" means that the movie is tight as hell. There's not a moment wasted: everything goes towards character development or moving the plot forward, all set to what is arguably James Horner's very best movie score (this might even be my absolute favorite movie score of all time; too bad the prices on Amazon make me cry). And if that sounds like a dull experience, you'd be wrong. Because this movie has Don Bluth and his animators at the top of their game.

"The Land Before Time" is seventy minutes of nonstop amazing hand-drawn, hand-painted analog animation. This is still one of the most gorgeous movies I've ever seen and it includes some of the most astonishing sequences of character and effects animation I've had the pleasure of watching to this day. I don't know if there's an actual record for this, but I think it's fair to say that this little film, pound for pound, has more hand-rendered special effects animation than any other. (I remember the wonderful Bob Thomas book, Disney's Art of Animation: From Mickey Mouse to Beauty and the Beast, in which one of the special effects animators bragged that "Beauty and the Beast" had "everything but volcanoes". Hey, guess what "Land Before Time" has? And there is a distinct lack of CAPs technology in their end credits. [Then again, "Beauty and the Beast" has a character who is a constantly moving and changing light source, so if you ignore the computer animation issue, the films are pretty even.])

And I'm just going to go ahead and say it: this is the very best fully animated film about dinosaurs. The production team went all out and made the most accurate dinosaur movie for it's time (EDIT: heavy emphasis on the "for it's time" part). And yes, I know how weird that sounds twenty-odd years later, but you have to remember that it was 1988, complete remains of some of the species depicted hadn't been discovered yet. Even so, about the only characters who really look bad are the hadrosaurs, the tyrannosaurs, and the... I wonder if that's meant to be an Oviraptor during the "even hatching was dangerous" scene? (It actually might be, as the only skull known at the time was crushed, so it was assumed they looked either a little less weird or a lot more conventional and ornithomimis-y.)

That's why this movie caused a sensation in my little ten-year-old universe. We were finally going to get to see a whole movie with dinosaurs in action. I know that doesn't sound like a big deal in today's post-"Walking With Dinosaurs" world, but you kids have to understand that back then, animated dinosaurs usually meant "Flintstones" reruns. And the only other high-profile dinosaur movie from the 1980's was... yeah...

So this was the first-ever movie I became a total fangirl for. But we'll hold off on that story for the next post, which will include a lot of potentially embarrassing pictures...

----

Sketch of the Day!

Time to shut up and ride this sauropod!

Something I posted after watching "The Land Before Time" for the first time in a while...

Originally posted at LaGremlin Land on 1/19/07.

You watch one movie enough times and it becomes a part of you. The millionth time was the charm for me and "Land Before Time" and here are some thoughts I had watching it recently:

* - Where are the "L.B.T." fan-websites?
I went out looking for some and came up empty-handed, so I guess I'm filling the niche with this page. I did find some information but it really raised more questions than answers. This has a lot to do with my second thought.

* - Where's the Production Information?
You know, sometimes you wish you *didn't* know so much about a movie's production. "L.B.T." in particular has had a lot of trivia popping up in recent years (particularly on IMDB and animation history books).
Most tantalizing is the rumor of deleted scenes, ten full minutes of them. Watch the movie very carefully and you'll see three scenes where this footage was most likely cut from:
(1) Note that there's no break between Sharptooth's first attack and the Earthquake sequence. Very awkward. I've seen a lot of evidence to suggest that most of the footage was cut out here.
(2) Between the scene where Littlefoot and Duckie meet Petrie and the scene where Cera encounters Sharptooth underground, there appears to be another awkward cut.
(3) I'm convinced that there was some major editing done in the finale. Note that Littlefoot makes it to the cliff overlooking the Great Valley *alone* and that none of the other characters are seen or heard at all. Then we see all the missing characters racing through the rock tunnel towards the Valley and then everyone *including Littlefoot with Petrie riding on his head* stops short on the cliff overlooking the Valley. Very strange.
(4) Miscellaneous weird edits: Listen carefully to the narrator in the scene where Cera gets put in her place at the end of the volcano sequence. Pronoun trouble! Also, there's obvious awkward overdubbing when Cera charges in to save the day at the end of the Sharptooth must die sequence ("Cera! You're back!").
What really frustrates me, and I know I'm not alone here, is that there's almost no chance we'll ever know the whole story here. There are only tantalizing little clues like the commercials (see the Links, below.) And that ties into my third thought.

* - Why do DVDs of Don Bluth movies suck?
My VHS has pretty much had it after eighteen years. However, I'm reluctant to buy the DVD because a little research reveals that they evidently used the same print from the VHS release without cleaning up the print at all or preserving the original aspect ratio. Worse, the few special features lend no insight into the original "Land Before Time" at all, and instead focus on the sequels. Speaking of…

* - THERE ARE NO SEQUELS!!!
There aren't! I can't hear you!
Seriously, with craptacular sequels ruining the reputation of the original, I maintain that "Land Before Time" is the animated world's "Halloween".

November 2008 is the twentieth anniversary of "Land Before Time". Who knows, maybe Universal will get a clue by then.
Though I doubt it…

Many, Many Related Links and Sources:
The Wikipedia Entry, IMDB.com Entry, and Rotten Tomatoes Entry are as good enough places as any to start. I suppose the Official Universal Studios Website is worth a look too (though, again, they are far more interested in promoting the sequels).
Here are two most curious finds. The video trailer and Pizza Hut commercial both feature a few quick scenes of animation that aren't in the film (for example, Duckie makes a face and Littlefoot says, "We'll always be together!") Were they made exclusively for the commercials? That seems like a terribly expensive thing to do for just a commercial. So, are they the last vestiges of the deleted scenes?
The book, The Animated Films of Don Bluth is long out of print. But this online version contains all of the original text (sadly, no illustrations). It has quite a lot of information about the production of "Land Before Time".
Lastly, here are links to the websites of artists who either worked on "The Land Before Time" or clearly had an influence on the look of the film:
Michel Gagne was a lead animator on "The Land Before Time" (not to mention several other great -and not so great- animated films). I recognized his style immediately when I saw his work in the wonderful Flight anthologies. His website is awesome with tons of sketches, and you'll even get to watch his jaw-dropping short film, "Prelude to Eden".
When I found a book of William Stout paintings, I knew he had to have been an "L.B.T." production artist too - but his name is nowhere to be seen in the credits. Still, many of the animals in "Land Before Time" look a LOT like his designs, and there even appear to be "shots" in the movie inspired by specific Stout paintings.
Finally, here's Don Bluth's Website! And… it's very strange. He has almost no information whatsoever about his movies! What gives? On the other hand, you get to watch two of the best scenes from "L.B.T." And you can even communicate with Mr. Bluth through a message board!
And although it's an entirely different movie, anyone reading this article will probably be most interested to know that the long-rumored Special Edition DVD of "The Secret of N.I.M.H." has been released. (With no promotion and a cover design that shows open hatred of the fandom; but it's still excellent.) This gives me some hope that maybe we'll see similar treatments for other Bluth films.
And finally, there's the Don Bluth TV Trope page and this item that popped up, by a happy coincidence, on Once Upon A Win.

-------

Hey, did you hear about that one giant company that bought that other giant company? (Some naughty words in that link.)