The Land Before Time (1988)

In 1979, Don Bluth quit his job at Disney and convinced a number of animators to come with him to start their own animated film production company. Their first two films garnered critical acclaim and success at the box office while Disney was seemingly stuck in a rut of films that failed to connect with audiences. Disney had to be sweating bullets when Oliver & Company opened against The Land Before Time and for good reason. Bluth’s liberation allowed him to tap into everything that Disney was lacking in the 80s until The Little Mermaid came along.

As water and food become scarce, a young Apatosaurus named Littlefoot and his family head out in search of the Great Valley- a land rumored to be untouched by the growing drought. Along the way, Littlefoot and his family are separated by a massive earthquake. Though dealing with grief, loneliness, and fear, Littlefoot commits himself to reuniting with his family. He soon picks up a hodge-podge of other young dinosaurs, forming a unique caravan. As the youths wander the wastelands for clues leading to the Great Valley, a dangerous predator is hot on their tails.

This film continues the success of Don Bluth’s animation team. Most of this film is full of crisp animation, rich colors, and a style that bests most of what Disney produced in the 80s. Each of the young dinosaurs is animated with just the right amount of anthropomorphism in that their dinosaur nature is never truly betrayed. The blend of two-legged, four-legged, and a winged dinosaur injects a nice sense of variety. There are a few moments of less sophisticated animation, where dimension lines are drawn over a splotch of one color. This was used during Bluth’s time at Disney in the 70s and, though I cannot blame him for falling back on a familiar technique, it still bugs me a little as it did with those Disney flicks.

The story is sweet and provides a good message to the target audience. The band-of-misfits-accomplishing-something-amazing storyline was used to death in children’s and young adult films in the 80s and is now terribly cliché but The Land Before Time rises above. Perhaps it is because our main characters are not people. Perhaps it is also because the only great thing the young dinosaurs do is fight to survive. Sure, they get creative in scaring off a group of aggressive pachycephalosaurids and come up with a plan to take on a T-Rex, but it’s never anything that seems too over the top.

Back in the day, The Land Before Time was a heartwarming tale of persistence and innocence. Millennials born after 1990 may not see much magic in the story but for those of us 80s babies, this is a joyful romp in childhood nostalgia. It may not be the masterpiece I grew up thinking it was but this film is still a winner and helped show other studios that Disney did not control the market on quality animated films.

RATING: 3.75 out of 5

RoboCop 2 (1990)

Combining fewer strong elements and even more flaws, RoboCop 2 detaches its hero even further from his partial humanity while providing mediocre thrills, a story that runs too long, and including some downright laughable elements.

The original RoboCop was a criticism of the Reaganomics-driven, capitalist-leaning society of the 1980s. It portrayed the very worst depths that a capitalist society could fall to with an utter lack of regulation and common sense. It was sensationalist propaganda to a point, which makes the main theme of RoboCop 2 all the more amusing. This time around, the titular character is waging a war on drugs, something advocated by Ronald Reagan. This powerful new drug called Nuke is being created and distributed by a man named Cain, who has a messiah complex from too many hits of his own creation. He’s rich, powerful and very well armed.

Behind the scenes, the Omni Consumer Products corporation is still trying to realize their vision of destroying Detroit and building a new Utopian metropolis in its place. Their latest move is to try and push the city to defaulting on its debt, which would allow OCP to foreclose and effectively take full control of the city. It’s an interesting concept, but one that requires some serious suspension of disbelief to make work. To help further the conflict, OCP creates a police strike by canceling the police department’s pension program, another jab at capitalism and one of the few elements in the film that actually still resonates today.

With only RoboCop to walk the streets in the name of justice, OCP moves ahead with their RoboCop 2 program. Instead of using the brain of an officer with strong convictions and willingness to uphold the law, they seek to use the vilest brains imaginable, bent on destruction and power. The RoboCop 2 program is to be used to eradicate civilians still living in Detroit once OCP forces the city into default.

I don’t know if it was done intentionally as a part of the cultural criticism or not, but the inclusion of a foul-mouthed 10-year-old boy who helps sell and eventually lead the drug operation is both laughable and repugnant at the same time. I have a hard time imagining any society that falls apart to the point where an elementary school kid could run a multi-million dollar drug empire. For me, it killed any remaining chance of me taking this film seriously. Though after the first film, how could anyone take RoboCop 2 seriously? What’s worse is that we’re supposed to feel sorry for this little brat when he lies dying in RoboCop’s arms later on.

RoboCop 2 runs longer than its predecessor, which is a major problem because RoboCop 2 has nothing new to add to the series and world of RoboCop. It gives us a few new, hopelessly evil villains and a new plot by OCP to pursue their ends by any means necessary. The flaws in OCP’s plans are quite obvious but the evil rich men are somehow oblivious to it. How can they honestly expect to build a Utopian city and prevent poor districts from springing up and crime from finding a home in an already corrupt idea? These are the sort of things that proof-reading and rewrites help to work out, neither of which must have happened here.

The visual effects are lackluster, even by 1990 standards. When RoboCop inevitably faces off against the RoboCop 2 model, there’s a whole lot of blue screen work and some atrocious stop motion photography. It’s almost amenable because the RoboCop 2 unit wasn’t exactly something that a person could have dressed up in and made a good fight scene with, but they way they tried to make these scenes work didn’t attempt anything cutting edge or groundbreaking. They fell back on tried and true techniques that were already becoming dated.

The biggest affront in my mind came at the beginning of the film. RoboCop was still trying to come to terms with his human past. He was essentially stalking his former wife and family by driving past their house. When confronted by the police department and his former wife, RoboCop abandoned his quest for grasping his partial humanity outright. Some might argue that he was being noble and did it so his wife had closure, but it strips the character of all humanity and allows the film to differ from any weighty character development in favor of violence, explosions and vulgarity.

RoboCop 2 isn’t so bad that it’s not worth watching. It’s just an underwhelming action flick for anyone hoping for more than what was given in the original. Sure, the sarcastic commercials still break up the story line from time to time and RoboCop peddles cheesy lines just like before while dishing out his own brand of police brutality, but there’s little that makes RoboCop 2 feel like its own film. It’s little more than a continuation of all the worst parts of the original. For some, that will be enough, but not for me.

RATING: 2.25 out of 5