The NeverEnding Story
Die unendliche Geschichte

My third try with this movie was certainly the most successful. I missed this when it was in the cinema and found the VHS and DVD viewing experience utterly lacking in magic. Seeing it on BluRay on a big screen worked a lot better, and I could finally see some of what others love about this picture. The 1980s really went all in on the fantasy genre. Movies made for kids, like The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth, Krull, The Sword and the Sorcerer, and Masters of the Universe, mingled with movies for adolescents like Conan the Barbarian, The Beastmaster, Highlander, and Red Sojnia, and films for adults like Excalibur, The Company of Wolves, and Big Trouble in Little China. Then there were films aimed at pretty much everyone, like Time Bandits, Clash of the Titans, Ladyhawke, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Willow, and The Princess Bride. Those are just the ones everyone remembers; there were dozens. Das Boot director Wolfgang Petersen's strange entry in this genre was a modest success that seemed to hit bigger with the generation that grew up after the kids the movie was aimed at were out of college.

Based on the 1979 German fantasy novel Die unendliche Geschichte by Michael Andreas Helmuth Ende, The Neverending Story was a big-budget German/American co-production that removed much of what was distinctly European about the story to attract as large an international audience. The filmmakers only adapt the first half of the book, so the movie doesn't fully convey the meaning of the title as portrayed in the novel, and a sequel that took on that second half wasn't made until six years later.

The fantasy story is told through the eyes of a lonely boy named Bastian Balthazar Bux (Barret Oliver) who is living in the present day. While hiding from bullies in a bookstore one day, Bastian is given a magical book called The Neverending Story, which beckons him into the extraordinary world of Fantasia. Skipping class to hide out in his school's attic, he buries himself in the book and escapes into the adventure of the story's hero, a young warrior named Atreyu (Noah Hathaway). Atreyu undertakes a quest to save Fantasia from slowly being devoured by a malevolent force called "The Nothing." Along the way, Atreyu encounters many fantastic creatures, and Bastian reads about the encounters.

>The dual protagonist structure is meant to come together magically, but unfortunately, it prevents the viewer from fully engaging with either kid or immersing us into the film's imagined world. We're never with these kids, the child emperors, the giant Rockbiter, the heroic horse, and all the other characters; we just look at them and admire how cool they appear. The creatures are indeed impressive, but their ability to captivate diminishes as the film progresses. It seems like the biggest amount of time, energy, and money went into the earliest scenes, and by the time the filmmakers got halfway through, they had to start cutting corners. I don't believe that actually occurred, but it sure looks that way. In fact, by the time we get to the film's most significant and beloved creature, a flying Luck Dragon named Falkor, he looks like an unfinished giant puppet that's been left out in the rain. Despite Falkor's off-puttingly mangy and unmistakably phallic design, the hand-made, hand-animated qualities of The Neverending Storyare the picture's most noteworthy aspect. It's just too bad the story itself is so slight that we don't care much about the world we're meant to fear might disappear.