#46: The NeverEnding Story
Release Date: July 20th, 1984
Format: Theater (The Frida Cinema in Santa Ana, CA)
Written by: Wolfgang Petersen and Herman Weigel
Directed by: Wolfgang Petersen
4 Stars
The NeverEnding Story is an appeal to the childhood psyche. It works on a subconscious level, and has the elements of our most basic primordial dreams and fears.
The film features a frame story where a sensitive, imaginative 10-year-old boy named Bastian skips school to read a mysterious, forbidden book entitled, The NeverEnding Story, a story of the mythical citadel of Fantasia. Fantasia is under attack from The Nothing, a brooding holocaust of wind and lightning, and Fantasia’s deathly ill Childlike Empress calls upon a boy warrior, Atreyu, and his loyal horse to trek to Morla the Ancient One in The Swamps of Sadness to seek help.
The trek proves disastrous and Atreyu is on the verge of death before he is saved by Falkor, the luck dragon. Atreyu and Falkor fly 10,000 miles in search of The Southern Oracle for advice on how to save Fantasia from destruction. The Southern Oracle tells Atreyu that only a human boy can save Fantasia, and that this mysterious boy must give the Childlike Empress a new name. Confused and seemingly defeated, Atreyu returns to Fantasia and apologizes to the Childlike Empress for his inability to stop The Nothing. The Childlike Empress tells Atreyu that there is no need to apologize, that he has in fact brought the human boy savior along with him back to Fantasia. In the most affecting scene in the movie, the Childlike Empress - in an extreme closeup - implores Bastian to give her a new name. At first confused, and then triumphant, Bastian runs to a window and screams out, “Moon Child!”, saving Fantasia from The Nothing’s destruction. The movie ends with Bastian riding Falkor through Fantasia and the real world as a narrator exclaims that they both go on to have many great adventures.
I don’t usually include such a thorough plot synopsis in my reviews, but I want to here in order to illustrate The NeverEnding Story’s efforts to tap into the deep well of a child’s emotions. It’s been awhile since my Philosophy 101 class, but I do remember the idea of Plato’s Theory of Forms. The idea is that the human consciousness is inherited from our entire species’ past existence, and that although the appearance of the physical world changes over time, these past “forms” are transcendent to time and space. Forms are perfect. An example of a Platonic form might be “beauty.” Plato would argue that beauty might be represented in a work of art or a person or sunset, but the form of beauty is beauty. We are always several steps away from actually capturing a form, but they do exist, deep in our subconscious. We as humans know what beauty is, as well as fear and hope and quests.
And because these forms are inherited, as Plato argues, it makes sense that a child would be as aware of them as an adult. In fact, a child would be more susceptible to the effect of forms than would an adult, as adults lose themselves more and more over time to the artificial appearance and trivialities of the superficial world. Where an adult’s mind might be focused on personal finances or current events, a young child’s mind may be brimming with existential fear or quests or monsters or triumph that are much closer to Plato’s forms.
The legacy of The NeverEnding Story is its masterful ability to speak to children on a deeply truthful level that they don’t quite fully understand. That none of us fully understand.
