Why The Land Before Time is one of the great­est kids’ movie ever made

The film com­pos­er James Horner, who died aged 61 on 22 June, 2015 after crash­ing his per­son­al plane, was a genius, a human­i­tar­i­an and an enig­ma. He has left us a wealth of musi­cal rid­dles that could pow­er a lifetime’s worth of cre­ative engage­ment. He clear­ly hadn’t fin­ished con­tribut­ing his wares to the world, and it would be easy and under­stand­able to let grief and grim exis­ten­tial­ism colour thoughts of his legacy.

What this writer wants to do, as some­one whose attach­ment is forged pri­mar­i­ly through his cre­ative out­put, is pay trib­ute to him through a film that floored me as a child and then floored me again as an adult when – through sheer coin­ci­dence – I rewatched it just two days before his untime­ly passing.

Don Bluth’s The Land Before Time from 1988 is a 66-minute movie about five car­toon dinosaurs who can no longer sur­vive in their scorched home­land and set out on a quest to reach the Great Val­ley. It’s also one of the most pow­er­ful med­i­ta­tions on child­hood bereave­ment with­in the fam­i­ly film canon – fuck it – in any canon. Small, anthro­po­mor­phised ani­mals being sep­a­rat­ed from their moth­ers may have become a tried and test­ed trope in Dis­ney movies, but The Land Before Time – ani­mat­ed in the clas­si­cal, hand-drawn style for Uni­ver­sal – is more poet­ic and con­sis­tent in how it ren­ders the spir­i­tu­al sig­nif­i­cance of a dead parent.

The nar­ra­tive moves so fast and yet stays with the baby Diplodocus, Lit­tle­foot, in the ago­nis­ing after­math of his mother’s demise. He curls up in her foot­print, too depressed to move. It’s so real. I felt the pain of los­ing my noble pur­ple Diplodocus moth­er after she gave her life sav­ing me from a ram­pag­ing Sharp Tooth.

Less­er films would have done the soap opera thing of hav­ing a char­ac­ter go through a peri­od of trau­ma that they nev­er again ref­er­ence as oth­er, more excit­ing events take over. Littlefoot’s moth­er nev­er dis­ap­pears. She is nev­er far from his mind and the film stays with how that feels.

He can only drag him­self into action after he hears her soft­ly issu­ing direc­tions to the Great Val­ley and leads his new, also lone­ly young friends, towards this promised Val­hal­la. This crew is com­prised of the stuck-up Cera (a Tricer­atops), talk­a­tive, friend­ly Ducky (a Parasaurolo­phus), eat­ing machine Spike (a stegosaurus) and Petri (a Pter­a­n­odon) who is scared of flying.

There is light­ness and there is dan­ger, there are quar­rels and dis­agree­ments between the dys­func­tion­al band which give The Land Before Time its con­stant momen­tum. But its pow­er source – its depth – remains root­ed in the fact that a brave lit­tle dinosaur is try­ing to fol­low through on his mother’s last words while still dev­as­tat­ed by her absence.

When­ev­er she comes back to him, though whis­pered words, long shad­ows or shapes in the clouds, James Horner’s score is there, reach­ing tor­tu­ous­ly high notes, using heav­en­ly chorals to remind us both of the place that she is and where a glimpse of her char­ac­ter can take Lit­tle­foot for a tem­po­rary psy­cho­log­i­cal ele­va­tion before a return to the black­ened ground. James Horner’s music is the sound of an absence made present. It is the sound of a bond that by all ratio­nal accounts should be sev­ered but is saved by the depth of its impres­sion on memory.

As a writer, ply­ing my trade in words, it seems mirac­u­lous that sounds can con­vey not just feel­ing but lay­ers of feel­ing and not just on-screen char­ac­ters but ones that have been ush­ered off. I don’t know how to cel­e­brate James Horner’s achieve­ments in the lin­go of his trade but I know what the appli­ca­tion of his music does to a film land­scape. Any­one with the pow­er to under­stand and chan­nel such exquis­ite nuance of feel­ing knew about life and knew about death.

There is no more fit­ting a solace for those harmed by the news of his pre­ma­ture death then to lis­ten to the eulo­gy he pro­vid­ed for the char­ac­ters that he cared for in his own exem­plary and emo­tion­al musi­cal lan­guage. In the score he wrote for The Land Before Time are insights into the bit­ter­sweet secrets of the uni­verse and how it feels to live in a land after a loved one’s time.