The Land Before Time

The Land Before Time is a 1988 animated adventure drama film directed and co-produced by Don Bluth from a screenplay by Stu Krieger and a story by Judy Freudberg and Tony Geiss. Its executive producers are Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Kathleen Kennedy, and Frank Marshall. The film stars the voices of Judith Barsi (posthumously), Burke Byrnes, Gabriel Damon, Bill Erwin, Pat Hingle, Candace Hutson, Will Ryan, and Helen Shaver. It is the first film in the Land Before Time franchise. Produced by Amblin Entertainment and Sullivan Bluth Studios, it features dinosaurs living in prehistoric times. The plot features a young brown Apatosaurus named Littlefoot, who ends up alone after his mother dies protecting him from a villainous Tyrannosaurus rex. Littlefoot flees famine and upheaval to search for the Great Valley, an area spared from devastation, where the adult dinosaurs have moved on to. On his journey, he meets four young companions: Cera, an orange Triceratops, Ducky, a green Saurolophus, Petrie, a brown Pteranodon, and Spike, a green Stegosaurus. The film explores issues of prejudice between the different species and the hardships they endure in their journey as they are guided by the spirit of Littlefoot's mother and forced to deal with the Tyrannosaurus rex that killed her.

The Land Before Time is the only Don Bluth film of the 1980s in which Dom DeLuise did not participate (instead, he starred in Disney's Oliver & Company released that same day), and the only film in the Land Before Time series that is not a musical, as well as the only one to be released theatrically worldwide. It was also the last film that Bluth directed that was scored by James Horner, executive produced by Spielberg, and distributed by Universal Pictures.