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The Land Before Time II: The Great Valley Adventure (1994)

While The Land Before Time II: The Great Valley Adventure has a nice message and a sweet tone, it’s a significant step down from the original movie. It’s an animated direct-to-video musical adventure. I lowered my expectations accordingly. Even so, I can’t see any adult watching this picture and not wishing they had simply re-visited its 1988 predecessor instead.

Little Foot (Scott McAfee), Cera (Candace Hutson), Ducky (Heather Hogan), Petrie (Jeff Bennett), and Spike (mostly silent, but voiced by Rob Paulsen) are living peacefully in the Great Valley, but unhappy with their parents' attitude towards them. Wanting to grow up and show that they can be taken seriously, they confront a pair of egg nappers and mistakenly bring back an egg to the Great Valley. Before they know it, a new friend hatches!

The biggest disappointment is the drastic shift of tone and style. The Land Before Time is kind of a tough movie. Littlefoot sees his mother die and falls into a deep depression. Death isn't sugarcoated. It features no scenes of singing and dancing dinosaurs. The lessons learned are subtle. Its happy ending glosses over the incoming extinction but you feel that the era we saw is ending. Obviously, certain changes were required for this to grow into a franchise but did it HAVE to be a musical? The songs are badly written and the performers are not good. At all. There are three original songs, two performed by the cast of child and young actors - rather than singers. They’re not in-synch with each other, making you wish separate voices for these numbers had been hired.

It’s got some colourful new characters, dinosaurs frolicking in the wilderness and a simple story for children, that's enough for indiscriminating viewers. The lesson about the importance of staying a child? That's been done before, and better. The animation is alright, I’d say slightly better than your average children’s animated show from the ’90s. What will prevent adults from enjoying The Great Valley Adventure are the story and the songs. There’s not much to the story at all. The new antagonists introduced are bumbling dinosaurs that interesting. The story is not creative. This feels like an elongated episode of a television series. Those could've still been brushed away but not the songs. Parents want movies their kids can watch over and over. I suspect many adults will be driven to the loony bin from hearing You’re One of Us Now over and over.

Am I being too harsh? Maybe but this picture is little more than a cash grab and everyone involved knew it. Even the people buying this movie are likely to know they're in-store for an inferior story. That's no reason to cut it some slack. Still, I can't pretend I wasn't entertained by The Land Before Time II: The Great Valley Adventure when I saw it as a child. As an adult, however, I suggest you go out and do some yard work when the kids pop this one into the machine. (On VHS, March 15, 2015)

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