"Land Before Time" and the Wiseman Connection

3 year-old Caroline insisted that we watch "Land Before Time" about six or seven times, so I'm well-prepared to do an in-depth visual analysis, but I really want to comment on something that struck me about 10 minutes into the first viewing, and that's the narration. The story is basically a re-telling of "Bambi" (1942) set in the late Jurassic era, so there's a certain amount of science that's nice to know: earthquakes and volcanoes are inconvenient for living things, and there were quite a few inconvenient things in the time of the dinosaurs. That's about it. The rest is plot contrivance: the animals travel west (to California?) in search of a better life and along the way they overcome their segregationist tendencies in the name of survival.


I thought the narrator would be killed off at the beginning, perhaps struck by a meteor, but the white guy with the deep voice just kept going on, describing character's thoughts and desires and generally telling us things we already knew. My memory is hazy, but I do not remember "Bambi" having a narrator, and I'm sure this movie would have been quite a bit better without one.


Woody Allen movies run the gamut in narration from good to bad to ugly, and I'll admit to being mystified: sometimes he appears to know what he's doing and sometimes I think everyone's too scared of him to tell him when to let it go...


But the most important point regarding narration has already been made by Frederick Wiseman, the documentary filmmaker whose movies have never included narration and never will. My favorites are "Titticut Follies" (1967) and "Primate" (1974) but you can pick any one to get the point, and everyone, regardless of whether they "like" documentaries or not, should watch a Wiseman documentary, so he can show you how it should be done.