Except It’s Not Really About Flying at All

It’s sad. We were on such a good upswing from The Big Freeze, through Journey to Big Water, and then finally The Great Longneck Migration, with each film providing a decent story, good character development, and a bit of connective continuity that made these feel like a real film series and not just a bunch of, well, gaiden OVA adventures. I honestly thought that, under the directorial guidance of Charles Grosvenor (who has headed the series since film five, The Mysterious Island) we might just have a film series that kids and adults could enjoy together. But then we hit Invasion of the Tinysauruses which wasn’t just dreadfully dull, it also taught the wrong message about intolerance. And now we have The Great Day of the Flyers which, while being far less offensive, is even more dull.

The big issue with The Great Day of the Flyers is that the film doesn’t really know what it wants to do with itself. Its title would suggest that the movie would be all about Petrie and, eventually, it does get there, but it’s all in service of a story that, one would think considering all the past adventures of the characters, would be completely pointless in the context. Meanwhile, as if the film understands that its own story is pretty useless, The Great Day of the Flyers spends a lot of time ignoring the titular flyers to focus on Cera and her family problems instead. Easily eighty percent of the film about flyers isn’t about the flyers at all, which is really pretty stupid.

The day of the flyers is coming up in the Great Valley, with pteranodons from all over the land flying in for the celebration. The day marks the time when young flyers graduate and are considered real, proper flyers. Petrie and his brothers and sisters have all been practicing, getting ready with a coordinated formation drill that they can fly and show off on the day, except Petrie keeps failing, getting distracted and ruining the formation when they practice it. His siblings are seriously angry with him about it, to the point that they want to kick him out of their drills completely. It’s only when some weird creature named Guido (voiced by Rob Paulsen) shows up and befriends Petrie that, through his advice, Petrie finds his own strength and confidence.

Meanwhile, Cera is going through her own crisis. Her father, Topsy, and her new stepmother, Tria, have laid an egg which, soon, hatches. The resulting baby, Tricia, gets all of their attention while Cera gets completely ignored. She starts to feel like the odd one out in her own family, although at least her new little sister seems to love her. Cera just wants to be acknowledged, to know that her parents still love her, but whenever she’s ignored it hurts her just a little more. She fears that, at this point, nothing will change their mind, although a big event coming up on the day of the flyers could change that entirely…

The Great Day of the Flyers, wisely, invests most of its time on Cera and her story. There’s solid drama mined here, from her hurt feeling at being ignored by her family, to a bit of jealousy she feels towards the relationship her parents have with little Tricia. These are matters I’m sure plenty of little kids go through all the time, and seeing a character they love have similar issues, feelings of being ignored, of anger, of jealousy, I’m sure that helps them deal with their own feelings towards their parents and new siblings that might come along.

Credit where it’s due, I think it’s good character development for Cera to have her go through something new in her family. Having a little sister (technically half-sister, but still) is different from her having a niece and nephew to deal with (as she did in The Secret of Saurus Rock), it’s a different family dynamic, a different relationship entirely. But what I appreciated most about this was that Cera, despite losing her place in the family unit she’s had for, quite possibly, years doesn’t take it out on her little sister. She loves her dearly, and that’s healthy. It’s a good relationship to show for any young child watching.

On the flipside, the Petrie storyline is dull and insipid. After the first film, where Petrie got over his fear of flying, the films have never shown him to be a bad flyer or to be particularly concerned with his abilities at all. He’s a hero, like the other kids in his friend group, and usually people are complimenting him on a job well done. Having him suddenly doubting his flying ability, with all of his siblings and even his mother actively saying he lacks the focus and aptitude is a sudden character retcon on the order of Marty McFly suddenly developing an aversion to being called “Chicken” in Back to the Future Part II. It comes completely out of nowhere.

I suppose I would have accepted this storyline if it actually led somewhere, but all it does is get Petrie back to where he effectively was in every other movie up to this point. He doesn’t learn any lesson beyond, “I need to believe in myself,” which, note to the creative team on this film, it seemed like he was doing just fine on that account before this movie. This strikes me a lot like Littlefoot suddenly being a liar and a cheat in the previous movie when, up until that film, he’d never had a dishonest bone in his body.

I totally think they could have done a story about self-doubt and needing to find your own strength. A character like Ducky or Littlefoot would lend themselves well to that, and I think there’s merit in a story like that. We all have doubts. We all wonder if we’re good enough. Showing a character (who lends themselves to that kind of story) going through it could be eye-opening for a little kid. I respect that effort. I just don’t think that Petrie was the right character to use for that storyline, especially not when it comes to his flying.

And then there’s Guido who, quite frankly, adds nothing to the film. He’s a proto-bird, a microraptor, and his story is about him arriving, not knowing who he is or how he got there, and then learning that he, too, can fly. Primarily he’s there to teach Petrie to believe in himself (which, again, Petrie was doing just fine on that account before now) and fill time. He wastes a lot of time, in fact, with a good twenty minute chunk of the film where the characters follow him around while he sleepwalks in a long space of story that leads to absolutely nothing. It was dreadful.

And bear in mind, nothing about Guido’s story ever resolves itself. We don’t ever learn who he was before he showed up in the valley, and his memories are never restored. He doesn’t learn where he came from or who he is. He just magically appears one day to teach Petrie a lesson (that the flyer didn’t need to be taught) and then he disappears again (at least until a single episode of the TV series). It’s just so stupid that they brought him in at all.

All of this then amounts to very little, as well. Petrie’s story barely intersects with Cera’s story at all until the very end. Up to that point his story has nothing to do, thematically or structurally, with Cera’s plotline. There’s no overlap in tone, nothing that drifts from one storyline to the other. Outside of the climax of the film, these two plotlines could exist in entirely separate films. It’s only when little Tricia falls into a river and has to be saved that Petrie swoops in and rescues her, and even that is just circumstance. In a different setup for that action sequence it would be Littlefoot or Ducky who save her instead. Petrie does it simply because this is supposed to be his movie so he needs a hero moment to prove himself. Otherwise, it doesn’t matter who does what.

In the end, then, The Great Day of the Flyers is a pretty awful film. It’s half a good movie about Cera mixed with a terrible story about Petrie and a lot of filler about a character, Guido, who doesn’t matter at all. It’s too long, too boring, and never really goes anywhere. And, looking ahead, we don’t even see little Tricia again until the television series, and she’s not even frequently featured. Nothing in this film matters or logically needs to be here, and it all could have been done better as episodes of that series instead of as a full-blown movie. And when your movie actually would work better as television episodes, that’s what you know it’s truly failed.