Don Bluth, with the support of Lucas and Spielberg, continues to emulate (for lack of any better notions of his own) his animation mentor, Walt Disney, in a tale of prehistoric dinosaurs. But the model is not so much those ferocious battlers of Fantasia as it is the fawns and bunnies and squirrels and assorted woodland creatures of Bambi. Dinosaurs, one might object on their behalf, are not fuzzy-wuzzies and cuddly-wuddlies, however, and these creatures are mostly overcute, excepting only the ravening Tyrannosaurus rex (clearest echo of Fantasia). The storyline, modelled more on the anti-Disney Watership Down than on Bambi, and permeated with that Lucasian faith in the mass producibility of myth, tells of the quest of Littlefoot, the great last hope of a dwindling herd of Leaf-Eaters, for the fabled Great Valley; and of what he learns along the way about "the Chain of Life" and about that bit of motherly wisdom which the finger-crossing filmmakers must hope the audience will apply to the movie at hand: "Some things you see with your eyes, others you see with your heart"; and ultimately of his arrival in the Promised Land, where there are "enough tree-stars [i.e., leaves] to feast on forever." Forever? one wants to ask. Forever? Dinosaurs, one might object again, do not have the prolificacy reputation of rabbits, and an elegiac mood would surely have been appropriate to a movie about their struggle for survival. In the present circumstances there emerges only one tenable theory for what the species may ultimately have died of: premonitory embarrassment. (1988) — Duncan Shepherd
This movie is not currently in theaters.