Let’s Do a Racism!

Well, we were on an upswing there for a little while, but now we come crashing right back down again. It’s pretty apparent that the mandate for these Land Before Time films wasn’t, “make a movie when you have a good idea,” but, “we need to have one of these out every year to continue the money train.” The series saw twelve films come out over a thirteen year span, and whether the ideas were good or bad, the films themselves had to crank out like clockwork. As long as little kids were interested in the adventures of Littlefoot and his crew of homies, the films had to keep chugging along.

That’s likely why a film like Invasion of the Tinysauruses, which is terrible for so many reasons, came out in 2005. It’s the eleventh film of the franchise, and it’s the first in a long time that feels like it should have been an episode (or a set of episodes) for a television show instead of a full-fledged movie. And you get the vibe that the crew knew this as we were only two years out from the Land Before Time television series debuting and running for 26 episodes. The animation on the show was the same as used for these later films, the creative team was shared between films and shows, and even most of the voice actors continued on, creating a behind-the-scenes continuity for much of the later run of this series.

But while we can understand where the series was heading, getting more and more direct-to-television with every passing year, that doesn’t mean this film had to suck. We’d been getting solid, sweeping adventures with heart for the last few movies, and we could have continued on that trend. Instead we get a film that’s very insular, that tends to make all of its characters look bad and sound like they haven’t learned anything in all the time these films have been going on. But, worst of all, Invasion of the Tinysauruses is painfully boring. Just incredibly, absolutely dull from start to finish.

We join up with Littlefoot (now voiced by Aaron Span) and his posse as they stare longingly at the tree that produces sweet treats. The blossoms on the tree, when they reach full maturity, are among the best in the valley, and once they kids discovered it some time back they told everyone in the Great Valley about it and it has become a tradition to let the tree mature and have a day of sharing and eating from the tree. Except the kids, Petrie, Ducky, and Spike, want to steal a couple of blossoms early and enjoy them before everyone else. Littlefoot convinces them not to, and they grudgingly agree. But it’s Cera who just has to rub it in, saying she always gets to have the first blossom since she discovered the tree (even though Littlefoot was the one that found it), and then she mocks Littlefoot for being too small to reach the blossoms on the tree on is own.

This sends Littlefoot spiraling, lamenting the fact that he’s still tiny and hasn’t grown at all in all the many years (and it has to be years with how many times the tree has blossomed) they’ve been in the Great Valley. Out of spite he tries to steal a blossom from the top of the tree, but he only manages to fall into the tree, knocking all the blossoms off. When he wakes up he finds a whole pack of tiny little longnecks eating up all the blossoms. When the adults arrive, he blames it all on the. Little longnecks, the Tinysauruses, and this sends the adults into a panic, looking for the “vermin” so they can send them packing. The tiny dinos have to be eliminated, they say, which makes Littlefoot feel bad because once he meets and talks to the tiny guys, he realizes they’re pretty great.

I struggle with this film for a few different reasons. The first is because the film absolutely has to strain to create anything approximating attention. Think about the fact that the film has to invent a new, special kind of tree never before seen in the series. It then has to create an arbitrary limitation on when this tree can produce its special flowers. It has to set up a situation where the good kid, Littlefoot, is made fun of and punished for no reason so that, against everything we know about his character from the previous ten adventures, he lashes out and tries to do something bad. And then he gets blamed for all the blossoms disappearing even though, despite anything else that happened, he didn’t eat any of them at all. It’s the film twisting its story into knots to try and teach some kind of morality lesson.

The film could have easily done a similar story if it had just adjusted a few elements. Instead of some special new tree it could have simply been a tree with the best tasting tree stars around (since tree stars have been a special food for the dinosaurs since the very first film in the series). Instead of Littlefoot acting against character, it could have been Cera lashing out, since that’s normal for her behavior, or Ducky covering for Spike after he tried to eat the blossoms. The film ignores everything that’s already pre-established in the franchise to tell a story that, frankly, doesn’t make much sense from a character perspective.

And there is justifiable reason for Cera to lash out in this film as one of the side plots is about her dad, Mr. Threehorn (aka, Topsy) falling for an old flame, Tria (Camryn Manheim), who has returned to the Great Valley. Cera feeling jealous about her dad not giving her as much attention as he used to as he goes skirt-chasing is a perfectly understandable and viable plotline. If she used that to try to steal the first blossom, since her dad was planning to let Tria have the first blossom instead, then we get the same story setup without mangling characters in the process.

I’m sure the justification was that Littlefoot needed something to do, but we could still get there. The tiny guys are teeny little longnecks, and since Littlefoot is a small longneck, they could still bond. Littlefoot can be given things to do with the film's need to assassinate his character for no reason. And that works better because, at no point in any of the previous films, have we ever seen Littlefoot be angry about his size, nor has he ever felt the need to lie. The character we get in this film feels like a completely different Littlefoot, and whatever is going on with this character should have been given to someone else, new or old, that would better fit the story.

Of course, then we have to get to the biggest issue I had with the film: casual racism. This movie is trying to teach all the kids in the audience that we should respect each other and treat each other fairly, but to get to that lesson we have to get through a lot of hate and anger and mob mentality. It’s a story, essentially, about immigrants coming to the Great Valley and living in fear of being caught because, if the authorities spot them, they’ll be banished… or worse. Hell, Topsy (because it’s fun to call him that) even talks about murder. Like, shit man, this film got dark.

I’m sure some of my reading of this film is because I’m seeing it in 2025 and the political landscape is, well, hellish right now. But even without that perspective, the hate the Tinysauruses get for, essentially, no reason feels mighty out of place in this film. Hell, even our heroic characters, who have generally been kind to everyone and everything they meet, are all too willing to go door to door like Nazi ICE agents trying to find illegal immigrants and root them out. I might see that coming from Cera, who is casually racist in almost every film of the series, but it seems especially weird coming from Ducky, or Petrie, or Spike. And yet, there they are, all too willing to be evil for the sake of the story.

All of that is bad. All of it. But worst of all is that it’s not engaging, even from a hate-watching perspective. The story is morally reprehensible on multiple fronts, but then the pacing of the film is slow and dreary and it’s all so tedious and boring. If the film were vile but energetic I wouldn’t like it but I could at least keep up with it, but this version is so boring that it makes the vile racism and overt hate seem mundane. It’s a bad film with bad lessons that barely engages with what it’s saying, and it’ll then make the kids bored and tired of it so they don’t even get to the part when the adults suddenly realize they were wrong and learn a morality lesson. The film sucks on all fronts.

So yeah, I hated this one. This is a bad film for any franchise but, especially, one aimed at little kids. I had thought, with The Stone of Cold Fire, that we had reached the worst this franchise could present but the series found a way to get even worse. And we still have three more of these films to go.