The thing about drawing, like writing, is that it uses bare artifice to outline the incommunicable. Where photographic and sound recording carry with them the baggage of bringing to light, drawing is content to bring to mind. It's a broken episteme, or an episteme of brokenness, born of and soliciting the pain of the thing's non-presence. The artefacts produced by writing and drawing index to reality like anything else, but it's a second- or third-hand reality; reality as it is stored and defaced in memory, in memories of memories, in translations of memories codified in memory. It calls on, not the thing that's missing from reality, but its memory. Its artifice. Its outline. Its drawing. Critically, none of this makes the experience of the medium feel indirect. It only reminds the reader that the pleasure of the text is in working with and through the brokenness of its outlines. I sometimes wonder if its conspiracy with longing is what makes it such a popular medium in children's entertainment. The adult viewer returns to it, not because they long for the time of their youth, but because they long for the originary longing they fear they've lost.
The Land Before Time is so rich because it is in so many ways assertive in its diegesis, and in other ways so totally compromised by the brokenness of its medium. Its narrative is a lean Point A to Point B, and Bluth's storyboarding works through oblique angles, to cut a constant, vital diagonal line through the open rectangular space of the frame. It's all the work of the inevitable arrival, that insists we move faster and faster, to secure the uncertainty of the action within the already-known of the diegesis: Paradise. Herein lies its most fascinating tension. Its breakneck speed is to get us to affirm the narrative End, and yet the dynamism of the action has the End appear as a kind of afterthought. The End is put in question by the action that now appears to have a dynamic life of its own. One consequence is that Bluth's religious confidence is cast in great uncertainty, and this ushers in a more compelling exodus narrative. The film emphasises that the signs our protagonists read, which they believe are directing them to Paradise, are weak. The characters' belief in them appears naive, and yet there gradually mounts the eeriness of faith, and with it the suggestion that maybe there is something listening, responding, guiding. The incredulity we are encouraged to feel validates the signs as possible, where an insistence on their certainty would invariably have the whole thing ring as false.
Drawing addresses the viewer more directly than any diegetic framework placed on it. It's direct because it's messy, like anything that deals in memory. The Land Before Time's strange prehistoric landscapes were drawn from existing paleoart -- imagined depictions of prehistoric life, drawn from fossils. In other words the landscapes of the film are drawings based on the memory of drawings based on the memory of the creative interpretation of fossilised remains of the unknown. They are so vivid, and so beautiful, as to assert the reality of their artifice. And yet every cut appears to scratch its surface, revealing the layers of memory, some of which crumble and spill. When I see the initial confrontation with the sharptooth, I'm remembering the farm in Ruatangata. Prehistoric thorns are transposed onto a felled macrocarpa and we're playing inside its corpse. One of its spines (it has many spines) cuts open my hands and knees. I can't see my cousin's face, and now he's gone. It gets darker and the sky's awash in ink -- the grain of the unmixed pigment pools near where the moon should be. I'm remembering The Land Before Time as I move through rural Northland, trying to map it onto the immediate. Now I'm remembering the phantoms of rural Northland through the film, which has always brought to mind, or outlined, that which is missing. I remember though it, and what is remembered appears in pieces before it's absorbed back into the indeterminate mess of the medium that now houses it.
When the drawings aren't bringing the missing to mind, they might dissolve form altogether. This is another byproduct of Bluth's storyboarding, and the emergence of the dynamic line that cuts through the matter of drawing to establish time as movement. Part of it is also that not all of the forms have not been drawn or animated so many times as to achieve stability. Many of them retain the observational intensity of early drawing and rotoscoping, before things are honed and simplified as discrete animated units. Live-action footage of elephants and giraffes have been drawn over and mapped onto the fiction -- the effect is a striking liveliness that seems to shudder from within the drawn outlines, which then puke it out into the rocks and trees and skies as well. There's a kind of pure kinetic force to it all, that trembles across the surface of the screen, and then joins in with the compositional dynamic line, forcing the stuff of space to a serene velocity. The biblical and character-based narratives attempt to place shapes atop this force, and fail. They come to seem frustratingly intangible. But then the force the diegesis tries to domesticate can't bring us any answers in its place. To respond to just this vital force is to be back with the painful irresolution of drawing as a medium.
I mentioned before how children's entertainment seems to thrive on the conspiracy between longing and drawing. I can think of few films as direct about this as The Land Before Time, with its spectral Paradise, born of separation from the archaic mother, sitting forever outside of lived experience. I have no doubt Bluth's team believes in the spiritual capacity of Sehnsucht, but here it's about how its medium elicits memory, how it stokes desire for a return to something, how the text is only ever a wound, or a wound of a wound, pointing obliquely to some originary longing we can't for the life of us remember.
Written 30 Nov 2024