The Land Before Time is a family-friendly epic about five dinosaurs who journey to find the legendary Great Valley.
AND before ANYONE starts the age-old debate on whether Christians should watch movies that deal with dinosaurs and evolution, please hear me out.
This is a pretty good movie. And it delivers some hardcore spiritual truths.
Don’t believe me? Allow me to explain.
1. Believing in what you can’t see
In the movie, Littlefoot, the longneck dinosaur, asks his mother an important question about the Great Valley her and his grandparents want to get to so much. Specifically, Littlefoot asks how his mother can believe in something she hasn’t even seen.
Littlefoot’s mother replies by telling him that some things have to be seen with the heart.
Littlefoot, as a child does, accepts his mother’s teaching without question. As should we.
Littlefoot
Even if we haven’t seen God, miracles, angels or anything else in the spiritual category, that doesn’t mean these elements of our faith don’t exist.
Faith plays an important role in Christianity. In the Bible, we’re told that if we have faith we can:
He replied, “Because you have so little faith. Truly I tell you, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.”
-Matthew 17:20
And much like how Littlefoot does eventually get to the Great Valley by the end of the movie, so will we be rewarded for our faith by seeing God in glory.
And that’s an extremely important lesson to take away from the film.
2. You can’t make it on your own
God created woman so that man wouldn’t have to go it alone. The disciples were sent out in twos.
In the film, there’s another dinosaur named Cera who constantly tries to go it alone, often with comedic end results.
Cera and Littlefoot
However, there’s one pivotal scene in the movie where Cera is sleeping one night and all of her friends leave her to sleep with Littlefoot. Eventually, Cera, driven by the cold night air, rushes to sleep with Littlefoot as well.
At the film’s climax, Littlefoot tries to take down the villain dinosaur of the film, Sharptooth, but he is only successful thanks to the combined efforts of his friends and their natural God-given talents.
The moral to take away here is that when we try to go it alone, we either fail spectacularly like Cera or we can’t defeat evil. Remember, solitude is weakness, and there is strength in numbers.
3. Diversity
In Littlefoot’s world, different species of dinosaurs don’t play together or help each other. They all stay in their own little worlds doing their own things.
But when Littlefoot gets separated from his grandparents and Cera from her heard, the five dinosaurs left behind realize that they need to band together for survival.
Each dinosaur serves as a metaphor for different races. For example, Petrie the flyer dinosaur, speaks with an accent, thereby representing those who speak different languages. While Spike, the spike-tail dinosaur represents the mute population because he can’t speak.
What the movie teaches is that each of these dinosaurs, while different, still has value and talents to offer the world around them.
Which, come to think of it, is a metaphor for how we are all precious in the sight of God, no matter what race, sex, language, disability or ethnicity might separate us.
Littlefoot and his friends
Well, that’s it for my review. It was short and sweet, much like this movie.
Computer, cue some techno so we can all go home!
-Ravens Bane
[Please note all photos in this post come from IMDb].
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com
Goth Film Critic for Christ 