The Land Before Time

After An American Tale, Bluth surely had the clout to make a more adventurous animated feature than this, with its anthropomorphic espousal of American nuclear family values and its static, unimaginatively rendered backgrounds. You'd have thought, too, that a film about dinosaurs could have been mildly educational: giving the species' proper names for instance, rather than just 'Three-horns' or 'Longnecks', or - since the plot concerns a group of youngsters learning to travel together to find the Great Valley, where they'll all be saved from extinction - bringing in at least one of the theories about why the food chain became broken. Still, it has its moments: an earthquake scene is genuinely scary, the tension between the two would-be leaders should strike a chord with any kid who's ever wanted to be accepted by a gang, and some of the voices are well, if irritatingly done.