The NeverEnding Story (1984)

The NeverEnding Story arrived in 1984, a German-American co-production directed by Wolfgang Petersen and adapted from the first half of Michael Ende's novel. It concerns a shy boy named Bastian who steals a book, hides in a school attic, and reads about a warrior named Atreyu attempting to save the dying realm of Fantasia from a devouring void called the Nothing. The film remains a beloved artifact of 1980s fantasy cinema, and its pleasures are largely visual and atmospheric. It asks nothing of its audience beyond wonder.

For those of us who catalogue the era's progressive sensibilities, the pickings here are slim. The cast is white European and American, with Moses Gunn appearing briefly as Cairon and receiving no narrative weight. No romantic or identity-based subtext attaches to any character. The Childlike Empress, though a female sovereign, spends the entire running time bedridden and ailing, waiting for a male child to rescue her by speaking her name. That is not a feminist text so much as a fairy-tale convenience. Fantasia's inhabitants are gnomes, luck dragons, and racing snails, and the film draws no racial or social commentary from any of them.

The Nothing, so tempting to read as an ecological parable, is explicitly identified as the absence of human dreams and hopes. Gmork explains this in a monologue that constitutes the film's only moment of instruction, and it lasts roughly ninety seconds before the wolf lunges. Bastian's daydreaming and his father's worry are framed as grief and imagination, not as any condition requiring a diagnostic label. Ende himself later denounced the production as kitsch and commerce, though that grievance lives in interviews, not in the footage. What remains is a children's adventure with a melancholy streak and no agenda to speak of.