From here on out, I am a dork

I'm back in Richmond from Thanksgiving break. Had a rough time, but that's nothing that friends and a LAND BEFORE TIME MARATHON can't fix!

They should've read Jurassic Park. Would've known T-rexes can't see you if you're standing still. Sucka's.

Seriously, guys, you have no idea how awesome The Land Before Time series is.

See, I've always been a big time dinosaur nerd (though because people my age seemed to have lost interest in them I don't really ever get the chance to geek out about them) and from the age of whenever until the end of elementary school, all I drew were dinosaurs. I designed dinosaur games. I made up new dinosaurs. I tried to draw complete encyclopedias of dinosaurs. I doodled them all over my math homework. I doodled them when the teacher was talking about multiplication tables. I made dinosaur caricatures of '90s political figures. I embarrassed my older sisters by pretending I was a dinosaur in Giant. At one point my mom had her office space covered in probably 10-20 of my best compositions about the Mesozoic era.

In short, dinosaurs errwhere.

Hell, if I weren't so bad at mathematics and so good passable at art, I'd be in Montana digging up some dromeosaurid claw and obnoxiously re-enacting the opening scenes of Jurassic Park.

So its only natural that my favorite movie was the Land Before Time (the first one.) Now, I was born about 4 years after the movie was made, but I still managed to hop on the train by the time the second and third movies were coming out.

I hadn't watched the first movie (the best one!) since the age of 6, so seeing it with fresh, jaded older eyes gave me a new perspective on the depth of the movie's messages.

To elaborate, here is a scene that was cute and fun to me as a child, but never really spoke to me until now:

This was probably my favorite scene when I watched it the other day. Having come out of a big loss, though not so big as death, I could relate to Littlefoot in a way I had never considered. When I go through loss, I ignore everything like Littlefoot did, sometimes even gestures of kindness from other people, because things seem so bleak to me. When the narrator spoke about him losing sight of finding The Great Valley, I realized I do the same sometimes, and I understood what the message was: you can't give up on your goals, no matter how big of a wall you run into.

There are also messages of accepting people no matter how different they are (Cera and Littlefoot becoming friends despite their parents ideology,) persevering against fear and doubt (Petrie learning how to fly,) and the importance of friends and taking care of your bonds with them (they'd never find the Great Valley without each other.)

Seriously guys, I love these movies even more now. Except for the songs in the sequels.

And the sequels after number 5. They don't exist to me.


On an unrelated note, does anybody else get the feeling that The Brave Little Toaster was one of those movies Disney couldn't wait to shut away in the closet of obscurity along with the racist crows from Dumbo...?