Movie Thoughts: The NeverEnding Story (1984)

• Released: 20 July 1984
• Directed by: Wolfgang Petersen
• Running time: 1 h 42 min
• Rating 3.5/5

Synopsis

A boy reads a magical book about a fantastical world that needs saving, and ends up being involved in rescuing the realm himself.

My Thoughts

This movie is to me what The Dark Crystal is to many others. That being: 80's fantasy movie childhood trauma. Many people have been traumatized by the Skeksis. Well, I was traumatized by this lovely feature film.

Revisiting it obviously it on longer affects me that way. It's a charming fantasy film with a lot of good puppetry/animatronics and makeup effects. But I do think it's better to not show this to very young kids, like me when I was this young.

There's several scenes in here that definitely made a huge impact on me, whether it's Artax's death, the murder-sfinxes, the corpse or just the general depressing attitude of the movie. This is really just a world that's dying, and the only one who can seemingly save it is going on a quest that has little to no chance of succeeding.

And in the end, Fantasia is destroyed. And then it's not the hero Atreyu who saves the world, but it's Bastian, the boy reading the magical book, using his imagination to wish for a Fantasia like never before. Of course everyone who died in the process of Fantasia being destroyed comes back to life, but it still really scarred me because of how young I was when I first watched it.

One aspect of the film I really liked was the background paintings. Often times the locations of Fantasia would either be a well put-together set or nature footage from Earth, but there's some instances where they intermixed paintings with live-action backgrounds, which was a visual treat and made things just look a bit more grand and fantastical.

But it overall is a good family film. Just not for younger watchers. But the effects are still decent (though not all still hold up), the animatronics/puppets/makeup effects are great and our characters, though basic, are good as well. Plus, I like the message of how important reading and imagination is. 

Overall a good movie! Just...beware of showing this to five-year-olds.