In this column, we’re looking back at the 1980s as their own particular age of fantasy movies—a legacy that largely disappeared in the ’90s only to resurface in the 2000s, though in many ways, the fantasy films of the Eighties are far weirder and less polished than what we got in the aughts. In each of these articles, we’ll explore a canonical fantasy movie released between 1980 and 1989 and discuss whatever enduring legacy the film has maintained in the decades since.
For a more in-depth introduction to this series of articles, you can find the first installment here, focusing on 1981’s Dragonslayer. Last time we talked about Titans, specifically how they clashed, in Ray Harryhausen’s final film. This time, we’re going to drown in the Swamps of Sadness and get deeply retraumatized by 1984’s extended Limahl music video, The NeverEnding Story.
My little brother is named Sebastian and I called him “Bastian” for many years because of my deep-seated love for/fascination with/horror of The NeverEnding Story. It was one of the first films I can remember loving in spite of my family’s feelings about it rather than because of them. My stepfather, Eric Luke, wrote the Joe Dante-directed kids-on-bikes cult classic Explorers (1985), and the story goes (in my family, at least) that it was seeing a screening of the rough cut of The NeverEnding Story that caused the studio to pass on Wolfgang Petersen as director. I grew up in a world where the adults in my life hated the film and I was obsessed with it. So, how does it fare, over 40 years later? Does its nostalgia hold up, or was the man who showed Dragonslayer to a nine-year-old right all along? Let’s find out…
Based on the first half of the 1979 German children’s fantasy novel Die unendliche Geschichte by Michael Ende, The NeverEnding Story features Barret Oliver as Bastian (Bastian Balthazar Bux in the original novel), a bullied latchkey kid mourning his recently deceased mother, who receives a magical book from a mysterious bookseller (Thomas Hill) and retreats to the ridiculously spooky attic of his elementary school where he spends the day reading about Fantasia—a land ruled by the Childlike Empress (Tami Stronach) and endangered by a nebulous, annihilating force called “the Nothing.” The majority of the film follows the young warrior Atreyu (Noah Hathaway) on a quest to stop Fantasia’s advancing apocalypse, eventually culminating with the rebirth of the fantasy world when, in an inflection point for young viewers being introduced to the concept of meta-horror, Bastian himself must give the Childlike Empress a new name.
It was a huge box-office success that led to two (less well-received) sequels. While critical reviews were mixed but decent, it garnered very little love from awards organizations—though it was nominated for Saturn awards for “Best Fantasy Film” and “Best Music” and Noah Hathaway won another for “Best Performance by a Younger Actor.”
So, does it hold up?
Let’s not mince words: The NeverEnding Story is an absolutely gorgeous film. The Italian-German illustrator and children’s author Count Ulderico Gropplero di Troppenburg (who went by the nom-de-plume Ul de Rico) contributed concept art beautifully realized in Friedrich Thaler’s matte painting backdrops. These vistas are reminiscent of Ted Nasmith and Alan Lee’s illustrations of Middle-earth, but more fantastical and mixed in with a heavy dose of prog rock album cover art. There are images that both myself and my viewing partner found, upon rewatching, have wormed their way into our deep subconscious. The backdrops in the Swamps of Sadness are reminiscent of Caspar David Friedrich. Internal views of Childlike Empress’ Ivory Tower feel inspired by Brueghel the Elder’s painting of the The Tower of Babel. I realized my obsession with Giorgione’s Female Nude may well stem from the shattered frescoes in the temple where Atreyu confronts Gmork. Again and again, the film delivers gorgeous tableaus and vistas that are as evocative and mysterious as they are technically masterful.
The costumes and creature design, headed up by Katharina Litzinger and Jörg Trees, adapting from Ul de Rico’s concept art, is similarly marvelous. The film is filled with fantastic creatures: from those made from multiple stone faces to the awful, chelonian decrepitude of Morla, the Ancient One, and culminating in its most memorable achievement, Falkor the Luck Dragon. Built like a pearlescent, serpentine Cairn Terrier, Falkor manages to always look soft, friendly, and just a touch intimidating in his glittering Scales and downy, luxurious fur.
For most millennials, the scene in which Atreyu’s horse, Artax, sinks and drowns in the Swamps of Sadness—clearly a take, as my viewing partner pointed out, on Bunyan’s Slough of Despond—is an elemental nugget of our collective childhood trauma (just admire this incredible cosplay). And, while it holds up as an unsettling scene, it’s striking to me how much of the rest of the movie is equally frightening and suffused with unnameable sorrow: the Rockbiter’s speech about his “big, strong hands” and his despondent wish for oblivion after he’s unable to save his friends from the Nothing; the laser-eyed Sphinxes at the Southern Oracle, bare-breasted and perversely serene, turning an armored knight to slag and cinders while the twitchy gnome, Engywook (Sydney Bromley), cackles in delight; and of course, the very concept of the Nothing, depicted through darkening skies and howling winds, shredding the scenery while Deep Roy, decked out in Victorian country finery and seated atop a delightfully canine racing snail, cries out in mortal fear.
Like many children’s films, the story is (not so) secretly about a child dealing with grief. Bastion’s father (Gerald McRaney) ranks among the worst cinematic fathers per minute of screen time, demanding that Bastian “keep[s his] feet on the ground” and not let his mother’s recent death continue to affect his grades or his extracurriculars. While the film’s nominal message is that fantasy and imagination is part of the healing process, it also leans pretty hard into the cosmic horror of reading a book that seems to be coming, terrifyingly, to life. Bastian screams and hurls it across the attic when it describes him as Atreyu’s true self, or when his yelp of fear is heard by the characters he’s reading about. Most tragic, when he discovers at the end that he is the only one who can save Fantasia, he initially resists, echoing his father’s now-internalized cruelty, sobbing “I have to keep my feet on the ground” before finally giving in and shouting his dead mom’s name (“Moon Child”?) into the wind, redubbing the Childlike Empress. It plays out as a descent into madness, a final giving-in and submission to that which is strange and impossible bleeding into the real world. As Nietzsche said, “if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” It’s scary and sad and deeply affecting.
In putting Bastian through these trials, the movie captures, perhaps better than any other children’s film I’ve seen, the idea that reading fiction is a liberating experience in many ways because it is fundamentally unsafe. I still remember being about nine and reading Katherine Paterson’s Sign of the Chrysanthemum, a book which ends somewhat unhappily (though positively cheerful when compared with her most famous novel), and being so distressed to discover that novels didn’t have to deliver entirely resolved and uplifting endings that I could not sleep for hours after my bedtime. I found myself similarly overwhelmed at 17 after getting to the two-thirds mark of A Storm of Swords, and, again, in grad school, reading the end of Vernon Lee’s “Dionea” too late at night. The NeverEnding Story perfectly nailed that moment of realization for me, both when I saw it as a child and in my recent viewing. Its plot may be episodic and disjointed but it always feels emotionally right, even if “right,” in this case, means “harrowing and unsafe.”
The NeverEnding Story was followed by the two aforementioned sequels: 1990’s The NeverEnding Story II: The Next Chapter (which eight-year-old me absolutely saw in theatres), loosely based on the second half of Ende’s novel, and 1994’s The NeverEnding Story III: Escape from Fantasia, an original story. There was also a single season of an animated series, which aired on HBO from 1995-1996.
The NeverEnding Story will always hold the title of “most traumatizing children’s film” for a certain sort of millennial viewer. While ’80s genre films provided plenty of traumatizing moments (see my article on Willow for a brief foray into Cronenbergian body horror, or my article on Dragonslayer for an explanation of the ways in which this entire project is, in some regards, an exploration of the half-remembered darkness of things glimpsed on cable at a young age), this is many Xennials’ urtext. Not many films can boast a scene of visceral pet-death that ends with two boys sobbing unrestrainedly and have it not feel cheap or unearned. That scene of absolute devastation in children’s entertainment casts a long shadow that surely influenced later films—My Girl, Babe: Pig in the City, and the 2006 remake of Charlotte’s Web all come to mind—even if no one has ever quite been able to replicate it since.
It is also worth mentioning that one of the more polarizing moments in recent, nostalgia-bait-centric pop culture history centers on Limahl’s title track. Season 3 of Stranger Things (2019) has Broadway child stars Gaeten Matazzaro and Gabriella Pizzolo sing Limahl’s earworm of a title track, “Never Ending Story,” while fleeing from a twenty-foot-tall flesh monster. Stranger Things, for better or worse, is often deeply (deeply) obsessed with evoking nostalgia in its viewers for the ’80s and the Spielberg-led “kids on bikes” genre in particular. In a season that also featured an extended monologue about New Coke, this climactic (and deeply silly) moment provoked more eye rolls than ovations: another hollow attempt to provoke a feeling based on rote recognition rather than any genuinely earned good will.
But hear me out! That moment is also kind of perfect? Limahl’s song is absolutely iconic but also completely, tonally at odds with Petersen’s film (beyond a general Eurovision-y vibe). It’s a dreamy, fizzy romp that opens and closes out 94 minutes of nightmare after nightmare. For all its various heights and nadirs, Stranger Things (especially that uneven third season) doesn’t pull its punches when it comes to body horror. Pair that with the fact that it is the climax of a season that reads as an extended metaphor for the lingering trauma of child molestation (I lay that argument out in full in this essay from 2019) and the insertion of the song sits pretty accurately in the exact same context as the original did. The angelic “ah-ah-ahs” tinnily playing over David Harbour’s thousand-yard stare as he gazes, despondent, down the cold metal of a hallway in a secret Soviet base is a perfect encapsulation of the song coming in over the end credits of the original film. Whatever other sins the show committed, it found a way to perfectly preserve The NeverEnding Story’s legacy in that one moment.
But what do you think? Is my reverence for The NeverEnding Story misguided? Did it fill you with a deep horror (and attendant sense of responsibility) to realize not only that a book could change you, but that you might change a book? Let me know whether the movie holds up for you, and be sure to join us next time when we rip our gaze away from existential dread and turn towards the scantily-clad cartoon women of the Frank Frazetta/Ralph Bakshi leer-fest Fire & Ice.
This is the only movie my mom made us walk out of, as the horse was sinking of course.
For childhood trauma there’s also Old Yeller, The Fox and the Hound, and Bridge to Terabithia.
Yeah, 80s kids had all the trauma stacked up in English book reports. Z for zachariah? Where the red fern grows? At least these movies had the thread of hope in them.
“…sobbing “I have to keep my feet on the ground” before finally giving in and shouting his dead mom’s name (“Moon Child”?) into the wind, redubbing the Childlike Empress.”
This part was always eternally confusing to me. As a kid, I could never understand what Bastian was shouting at the end and assumed that it must be his dead mom’s name because that’s how stories work and is the only thing that makes sense. But then I read the book and learns that he calls her “Moon Child,” and my whole brain went ???????
I always thought he shouted, “Mariah.” Perhaps my youthful attempt to forge order from chaos.
My impression (from the movie, not the book) was that the name Bastian shouts was deliberately made impossible to understand, because the point wasn’t the name itself, but Bastian’s emotion and grief. (I also assumed that it was meant to be his mother’s name.)
When I was living in Russia, I saw the movie dubbed into Russian, and the dub had Bastian shouting “Mama!” at that moment, presumably because the translator came to a similar conclusion, but was unable to make out a name either. I thought at the time that it would have been better if they had left it undubbed.
Child of the 80s here, and I probably saw this movie more than any other as a kid and loved it every time. Pretty sure I still have the belief somewhere deep inside me that the characters in a book/movie/TV show really do exist somewhere out there, and that this is why I don’t like horror or unhappy endings.
By the time I saw the movie, I had already read the book „Die unendliche Geschichte“ multiple times (it was one of my favourite books in my early teens – I was twelve the year the movie was released). I liked the movie, but didn’t fall in love with it.
Artax‘ death in the movie didn’t traumatize me; after all, I knew that it was going to happen. This is not to say that the event isn’t traumatizing – I was horribly upset when I read the scene for the first time, and I remember trying to come up with ways to save Artax – couldn’t they share Auryn? Maybe lengthen its chain so that it would fit around both Artax‘ and Atreyu’s neck at the same time? Or take turns wearing it? But it was written in the way it was written, and I knew to brace myself by the time they arrived at the Swamps of Sadness, both in the book and in the movie.
I did notice a number of changes to the book (I was rather disappointed that Atreyu’s skin wasn’t green), but the one change that annoyed me greatly happened at the Southern Oracle. In the movie, the key to getting through the Sphinxes‘ Gate is to be confident – and when Atreyu’s confidence falters, he manages to get through by running between them so that their gaze misses him.In the book, Engywook tells Atreyu that, after years of watching those who failed or succeeded in passing the sphinxes, he can detect no pattern – so he thinks that it is purely random who makes it. You just have to risk it, there is no way to influence the sphinxes‘ decision, and confidence won’t help you one bit.
In a way, I can understand why the movie changed this. On the face of it, it is not very satisfactory storytelling to say „It’s sheer coincidence and dumb luck whether you succeed or not“, but even at twelve years old I was already rather distrustful of the school of thought that states that you can do anything as long as you believe in yourself and show confidence and so on. The „it’s random“ explanation of the book aligned much better with my experience of the world, and I found it a bit cheap to revert to the trite „just have confidence“-philosophy that was already a feature of so many books and movies, and I would have preferred it if the movie had stayed true to the book there.
(Another change, by the way – in the book, there is no hint at all that Bastian gives the childlike empress his mother’s name. This article is the first time I read about this; while watching the movie I seem to haven’t picked up on the fact that the movie states that it is his Mum’s name. But I only ever saw the German dub, maybe it was lost in translation.)
One last thing, for completeness‘ sake: Michael Ende, the author of the novel, hated the movie, so much that he had his name removed from the front credits. He was especially unhappy about the ending, where Falkor and Bastian cross over into the real world to chase Bastian*s bullies. As one of the main plot points of the second half of the book is how difficult it is for Bastian to get back home again and that he might get stuck in Fantasia forever, I can see Ende’s point, though I have to say that it gave twelve-year-old me a grim sense of satisfaction to see a few bullies end up in a dumpster.
I have never actually read the book, but that ending does seem more…on theme? The sense that by giving himself over to the fantasy, it might prove more difficult than he thought to come back to reality. The film’s ending was cathartic as a kid who had to deal with bullying, but is kind of insane, lol.
That’s so unfortunate the author hated the film.
This movie is like the keystone in the arc of my childhood development. It really sealed the feeling I’d always had that the things we imagined were real, even if that reality was only tangential to our own. Bastian’s journey of discovering he matters, and that he can–must–make a difference in a larger world really hit home for me as a kid. As did the fear of nothingness of all those characters, the grace and mournfulness of the Child-like Empress, and Atreyu’s frustration and courage in the face of Gmork. The film terrified me, but I watched it over and over again, weeping at Artax’s fate, and fearful of Gmork and the Nothing. The idea that each of us was both the author, audience, and protagonist of the stories that made up reality, that there were no boundaries between one story and the next, and all were just part of one greater story, cracked my mind open in a way that never closed up again.
And as a writer who struggles to make my work my priority in my busy life, his cry of “I will do what I dream!” to save a fantastical world, and all the unique and curious people in it, from disappearing into nothing, is still a call to action I feel deeply, and have to remind myself of from time to time. I think it’s a wonderful film, that sometimes gets tossed into the pile of 80’s schlock because of that damned song! (Which I actually love for it’s earnest and totally unabashed enthusiasm, but that is at odds with the film it’s featured in.)
For some reason, the Rockbiters really stuck with me the most. Artax was really sad, but I knew pets died at that point. But seeing the rockbiter want to cease to exist because he couldn’t fulfill his purpose as a rock-man-thing (his hands weren’t strong enough) really got in my head for years.
I, too, was not as moved by Artax’s passing, but found the scene with the Rockbiter absolutely devastating. (“They look like such big, strong, hands…don’t they?”)
That scene was the part of the movie that left the greatest impression on me (along with Falkor the luck dragon).
Love these narrative film retro’s :)
I guess I am the odd one out here, but I did not like the film when I watched it as a teenager. To me it felt rather boring and it did not grip me as other fantasy movies of the time, like The Dark Crystal or The Last Unicorn, both of which I adored (and still do). Not to speak of the Luck Dragon, which I found ridiculous in its look. But then, that’s 40 years ago, maybe I should give it another chance.
It is strange that Americans like the movie so much, but few seem to know the book that is much better (is that the reason?) or other books by Ende like Momo (there is a Momo movie, too).
Why did they have do rename Fuchur? It can still be visited in the Bavaria Film Studio.
The name of the Empress has nothing to do with Bastian’s mother (is that a bad translation?).
They renamed Fuchur into Falkor, because “Fuchur” sounds too much like the swear word in English.
The movie heavily implies that Moon Child was Bastian’s mother’s name, from an earlier scene when Bastian is staring at the sky and says something like “Too bad they don’t ask me for a name. My mother had a wonderful name.” I always interpreted that maybe his mom was born to hippies in the ’60s (thinking of Moon Unit Zappa) though of course that’s silly as she would not have been old enough then to have a child as old as Bastian in the early ’80s. It’s true in the book that the name has nothing to do with his mom.
I loved this movie as a young child in the ’80s, and it inspired me to ask my mom to get me the novel, which is one of the first I ever read. And despite my love for the movie, I agree, the novel is MUCH better! That was the first time I learned that lesson, which would be proven true almost every time there is a film adaptation.
One other point that kind of blew my mind when I first saw this is when the Childlike Empress is telling Atreyu about how Bastian has been with him on his whole adventure and she says “Just as he is sharing your adventures, others are sharing his. They were with him when he hid from the boys in the bookstore. They were with him when he took the book…” In other words, she was talking about us, watching The Neverending Story, about the boy reading the book with himself in it.
And yet the book has an even more interesting meta story. In the book, Bastian completely refuses to get involved, so the Childlike Empress takes charge in order to force his hand. She goes to the Old Man of Wandering Mountain, who has been writing down all the events of the story in real time, up to and including the Empress going to the Old Man. And she commands the Old Man to stop writing and to start reading the story from the beginning. The Neverending Story. He starts with the actual first lines of the first chapter of the book and keeps going. The narrative summarizes the action that he reads until the Empress gets to the Old Man, and then he starts to reread it again in an endless loop. And realizing that this will go on forever is what makes Bastian finally take the leap and call out the Empress’s name.
I have never heard of “Moon Child” being the name of Bastian’s mother before. When I saw the movie I just thought he made it up. I don’t think his mother’s name is Moon Child . It’s too weird maybe Luna . The movie never say his mother or fathers names that I remember .
Here’s the thing about Artax: Artax drowns in the Swamp of Sadness because he gives in to despay. It doesn’t matter that his best friend needs him. It doesn’t matter how much he’s loved. He gives in. He gives up. Artax dies by suicide. As a kid, I had no idea. It was just an awful sad tragic death. It was only later in life, after my own struggles, that I recognized it for what it was.
I named my son Atreyu. He is now 17.
I hope you tackle The Last Unicorn and Legend at some point.
Wow this sounds right up my alley but I’ve never seen the movie. I think because of the way the dragon/beast thing looks I have always dismissed it.