The NeverEnding Story (1984)

Official trailer

The NeverEnding Story is the rare children’s film that takes children seriously as readers. Wolfgang Petersen directed it. The script is based on Michael Ende’s 1979 German novel, which Ende publicly disowned the film adaptation of and which he asked to have his name removed from the credits before the film’s release. The film adapts only the first half of the novel. The second half, which is darker and stranger and, I’d say, more interesting, has never been satisfactorily adapted to screen.

Barret Oliver plays Bastian, a lonely boy who steals a leather-bound book from a bookshop and reads it in the school attic instead of going to class.

Noah Hathaway plays Atreyu, the boy hero inside the book whose quest is to save Fantasia from a force called the Nothing. Tami Stronach plays the Childlike Empress. The luckdragon Falkor is a practical puppet worked by multiple puppeteers. The film cost twenty-seven million dollars. That made it one of the most expensive non-American films ever produced at the time.

I adore this movie, flaws and all. It treats a lonely kid’s imagination as something worth fighting for, and it’s scarier and sadder than anything aimed at children has a right to be. My one real grudge is that it stops halfway through the book.

What Works

The film commits to the metaphor. Fantasia isn’t a real place. The Nothing isn’t a real villain.

Both are forces in Bastian’s interior life, externalized as a fantasy story he reads. The film is about what happens when a child doesn’t let himself imagine. The metaphor lands because the film doesn’t explain it. The audience figures it out by watching Bastian read.

The creature design is the best practical effects work in any fantasy film of the mid-1980s.

The Rockbiter is a man-sized practical puppet who eats stones. The Racing Snail is a man-sized snail with a saddle. Morla the Ancient One is a giant turtle puppet. Falkor is twelve meters long. None of it is CGI because CGI didn’t exist as a production option. All of it is built.

Falkor is the creature I’d defend against any digital dragon made since. He’s a twelve-meter puppet, and I believe in him more than I believe in most of the computer-generated beasts that replaced his kind.

Atreyu and the Swamp

The sequence where Atreyu’s horse Artax dies in the Swamps of Sadness is the moment the film became a generational trauma.

Atreyu is leading Artax through the swamp. Artax sinks slowly into the mud. Atreyu can’t pull him out. The horse looks at him and lets himself disappear. The scene is shot in long unhurried takes. Atreyu screams at him to get up. The horse doesn’t get up. Children in 1984 weren’t warned about this scene. They weren’t prepared.

The decision to film an actual horse partially submerged in a hydraulic platform is the kind of practical-effects commitment that a modern production wouldn’t attempt. The horse was safe. The audience didn’t feel safe. The scene is the film’s emotional center and it’s the reason multiple generations of viewers still talk about the movie with something resembling religious feeling.

The Swamps of Sadness is the scene that puts this at a 9 for me. I think it’s the bravest thing a children’s film did in that decade, and Petersen’s refusal to hurry those takes is what makes it hurt so much.

Ende’s Objection

Michael Ende hated the film. He felt the production had simplified his book into a conventional fantasy adventure, removed the philosophical depth, and turned a serious work about the imagination into a Hollywood picture about a kid with a book. He sued unsuccessfully to have the scenes he objected to cut, and he withdrew his name from the production. The published German title of his novel is Die unendliche Geschichte. The film’s English title was Anglicized to The NeverEnding Story. Ende objected to that too.

He had a point. The film is the first half of the novel. The second half, in which Bastian enters Fantasia in person and slowly loses himself in it because of the power the Childlike Empress gives him, is the part of the book that matters most. The film never adapts it. The two sequels are both bad and both ignore the source material almost entirely.

I’m on Ende’s side about the second half. Bastian entering Fantasia and losing himself is the richest idea in the book, and leaving it out hands the film a tidier triumph than the story deserves.

Does The NeverEnding Story still hold up?

9/10. A great children’s fantasy film and a flawed adaptation of a great children’s novel. The practical effects haven’t aged, and the Artax sequence left permanent damage on multiple generations. I knock off a point only because the film stops at the halfway mark of Ende’s story, and I think the missing half is the better one. Watch the film. Then read the book.

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