Buffer Turns a 1988 Dinosaur Movie Into Its Newest Souvenir Stand

A trio of graphic tees built around Littlefoot and friends lands at Buffer’s Shibuya store and online on Saturday, July 25.

Buffer only opened its doors this past April. The label is a project of HUMAN MADE Inc., the company behind NIGO‘s long running HUMAN MADE line, and it hands creative direction to Tetsu Nishiyama, the designer who has run WTAPS since 1996. Where WTAPS traffics in military reference points and utility fabrics, Buffer works from a different well: American ephemera of the 1980s and 1990s, priced at levels closer to what a high schooler at the time might have actually paid.

 

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Nishiyama’s path to this point runs through two other labels first. He launched FPAR (Forty Percents Against Rights) in 1993 as a bootleg graphic project pulling from anarchist iconography, then folded that energy into WTAPS in 1996, a name borrowed from the military term for a double tap, the second shot landing in the same place as the first. He opened the GIP Store in Shibuya in 2011 and has run it as WTAPS’s flagship ever since, later adding the family focused DESCENDANT label to the same portfolio. Buffer marks something different for him: it is the first project where he holds the creative director title rather than the owner’s chair, sitting instead inside HUMAN MADE Inc.’s own house of brands.

Original 1988 theatrical poster for The Land Before Time, illustrating Littlefoot and his companions beginning their journey through a volcanic prehistoric world while pursued by the fearsome Tyrannosaurus Shar.

HUMAN MADE Inc. has described the brand’s premise as an after school hierarchy: the way an upperclassman passes down a record, a jacket, or a way of talking to whoever comes after them. Buffer’s own name gestures at that role directly, a buffer or cushion carrying culture from one generation into the next. The brand’s flagship, called Buffer Store, sits in Tokyo’s Jinnan neighborhood in Shibuya, a few minutes from the WTAPS-adjacent GIP Store that Nishiyama has run since 2011.

Four seasonal tees and a run of souvenir goods opened the brand in April at 6,600 yen apiece, a number the label has now repeated for its second licensed release.

Buffer sits inside a wider roster at HUMAN MADE Inc., which also runs the original HUMAN MADE line and the Curry Up food project, alongside a running list of outside creator collaborations that has included Pharrell Williams, KAWS, Verdy, and Cactus Plant Flea Market. The same week Buffer Store opened, the company also switched on Buffer_DELTA, an installation space a short walk away in Jingumae that carries no retail function. It exists instead to host rotating displays built around the brand’s reference points, a second venue meant to explain Buffer’s world rather than sell it.

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The Land Before Time premiered in November 1988, directed by Don Bluth with Steven Spielberg and George Lucasamong its executive producers. An orphaned Apatosaurus named Littlefoot crosses paths with four other young dinosaurs, Cera, Ducky, Petrie, and Spike, and the five make their way toward the Great Valley while a Tyrannosaurus stalks the group. The film opened at number one in the United States and Canada and eventually spawned thirteen direct to video sequels along with a television series, none of which involved Bluth, Spielberg, or Lucas after the original.

Its lead single, “If We Hold On Together,” was recorded by Diana Ross and released ahead of the film in November 1988. Critics at the time landed somewhere between charmed and cautious. Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert gave the film two thumbs up on their television program, with Siskel calling it sweet rather than scary, while Rotten Tomatoes now holds it at a 65 percent approval score built on the same tension: reviewers found it beautifully animated but noted its story leaned hard into cuteness for anyone past childhood. Several critics reached for the same reference point, describing it as a kind of prehistoric Bambi, a comparison Buffer’s own framing seems to lean into by treating the film as gentle folklore rather than spectacle.

That sprawl of sequels and a 2007 television series stretched the franchise’s home video footprint across nearly three decades. Its path through VHS and DVD, rather than repeated theatrical runs, is largely how the film reached audiences in Japan, arriving as a rental shelf staple more than a cinema event, which lines up with Buffer’s own pitch of the collection as a memory object built for people who watched Littlefoot on a television screen rather than in a theater.

Buffer’s brief for the collection leans into an imagined, alternate merchandising history for the film rather than a literal recap of its plot. The three graphics are staged as if they were souvenirs from a theme park attraction that never existed and posters that were never printed, filtered through Buffer’s own view vocab rather than lifted wholesale from Universal’s archive.

 

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three

Three Tees make up the release. “The Land Before Time Stamp” is built as a fictional theme park souvenir tee, the kind of item a park gift shop might have sold if Littlefoot’s world had ever gotten its own physical attraction. “The Land Before Time Dinosaur Park” compresses each of the five characters and their individual arcs into a single illustrated composition, treating the ensemble cast as one collective adventure rather than five separate portraits. “The Land Before Time Little Foots” takes the shape of an imagined official poster, with artwork from illustrator Shuntaro Takeuchi, whose past work spans exhibitions including a solo show titled Twilight Zone at a gallery in Fukuoka.

Each shirt is priced at 6,600 yen, tax included, matching Buffer’s April debut. The brand has not published a total run count or confirmed whether restocks are planned once the initial batch sells through.

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The collection arrives Saturday, July 25, through Buffer’s Shibuya flagship and its online store. The physical location sits at Jinnan House 1F, 1 Chome 13 12 Jinnan, Shibuya Ward, Tokyo, open 11:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. on weekdays and 10:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. on weekends and holidays. The number listed for the store is 03 6712 7905.

Buffer’s debut collection in April sold in similar format: four tees and a set of souvenir items released simultaneously in store and online at 10:00 a.m. local time. Whether the Land Before Time tees will follow that same staggered restock pattern, or sell through in a single morning the way the brand’s WTAPS adjacent audience has come to expect from Nishiyama’s other labels, will likely become clear once the doors open Saturday.