Hi!
At the moment I'm doing an internship in Dortmund's institute of newspaper research. I had some spare time to do some research about LBT. Unfortunately I didn't yet find any English newspapers from 1988, but there were a few short articles in German papers of 1989 (when the movie was released over here). The results are altogether marginal. It seems they generally reported less on movies back then than they do nowadays. All I got from a regular paper was a small ad for LBT in the advertising section. I did find two articles on LBT in special movie magazines. Neither of them is a pleasure to read for LBT fans and I confess that I was smirking when I saw the movie hitlists where LBT remained at the top for many weeks despite the total roasting those articles were.
I'll try to translate the articles as good as I can. There are some phrases and inkhorn terms very difficult to transfer into English though. The first article (the kinder of the two) reads:
"Sometimes the 350 heads team around Don Bluth is taking real efforts, plays with perspectives and shadows and includes pretty slapstick feats. The backgrounds too often come across as impressive, the sky is varying magnificently between yellow pastell and fiery red and time and again the layers are arranged one after the other into the deep that beautiful ambient effects are the result. But nevertheless there is an déjà-vu right from the beginning: Nothing, absolutely nothing is really new and exciting about this cartoon. On the contrary: "The land before time" is a kind of museum of classical cartoon. Back to the roots is the slogan, and this usually means back to Disney in this businness.
Don Bluth, once employed in the grand master's studio, is in the early minutes clearly plagiarizing the primeval world scenes from "Fantasia". Later on, as of course it is about making cute and anthropomorphizing the fauna, there are borrowings from "Dumbo", "Bambi" and "The Jungle Book". The cute saurian heroes eat only plants of course, for nature is basically good. Only "sharptooth" alias Tyrannosaurus Rex is misbehaving.
So it's businnes as usual and this wouldn't be too bad as all if at least the movie had a half-passable story to offer. However, the whole fuss, the graphical talent, finally deflagrate in a narrative nowhere. It looks just like Disney, but it doesn't work out. The quest for the Great Valley, this is alright as a motive, but if during this only the themes friendship, danger, and rescue are repeated over and over again it is simply doesn't do, respectively it doesn't do very long: As soon as "sharptooth" has gurgled away in the water, there is nothing left to tell, so one is in paradise after one hour already."
I'll wait before posting the other article I found. Perhaps this article is giving some material for a discussion, so I will give it some time and see if that's a fact before I post the other article.
