The Land Before Time (1988) on Netflix

G19881h 9mAdventure Animation Family

A famine forces the herds toward the Great Valley, an area the devastation has spared. An earthshake separates Littlefoot, a young longneck, and Cera, a young three-horn, from their herds.

Netflix3.7/5
IMDb7.4/10108,576 votes
Rotten Tomatoes65%

Trailer

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Plot summary

In the Mesozoic, a famine forces the dinosaur herds to leave their home and search for an oasis called the Great Valley, an area the devastation has spared. A longneck dinosaur hatches a baby named Littlefoot, and while the herds travel, he meets Cera, a young three-horn, and plays with her. Cera's father sends him away, saying that each species should keep to its own kind. In the evening the two play again, and a large sharptooth pursues them. Littlefoot's mother comes to their rescue, and during the struggle the ground shakes and splits, dividing Littlefoot and Cera from the rest of the herds.

Cast

Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Land Before Time (1988)

Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.

The film began as a story about young dinosaurs hunting for a wise old one. Don Bluth then turned it into something harder: none of the dinosaurs get along, because they are taught from birth not to mix with other kinds, which he called racism outright.
Bluth, Spielberg and Lucas first wanted the whole film to run without a word of dialogue, in the manner of the Rite of Spring sequence in Fantasia. They gave up the idea and hired voice actors so that children would take to it.
To make the animals and the landscape credible the team visited natural history museums in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and the Smithsonian in Washington, consulted turn-of-the-century fossils and paleoart, and studied live footage of four-legged animals including elephants and giraffes.
At a screening in Soho Square in London in late April 1988, six months before the film was finished, Spielberg told Bluth it was too scary and warned him there would be children crying in the lobby and a lot of angry parents.
Nineteen fully animated shots were cut from the sharptooth attack, among them point-of-view shots of the dinosaur's snapping jaws, and the rest were rearranged. The trims left a visible error: the Tyrannosaur's right eye is open again after it has been blinded.
Perhaps only weeks before release Spielberg had more than ten further minutes removed so the film would not disturb parents or children, according to producer Gary Goldman. That took the running time down from around eighty minutes to sixty-nine.
SPOILER
The last act was originally quite different: Littlefoot was to reach the Great Valley alone and then turn back for his friends. That version survives in several book adaptations and in music still on the soundtrack album, and some screams were redubbed with milder cries.
The success of The Land Before Time, together with An American Tail and Who Framed Roger Rabbit, led Spielberg to set up his own animation studio, Amblimation.