The NeverEnding Story II: The Next Chapter (1990)

The NeverEnding Story II: The Next Chapter arrives in 1990 as a sequel to a beloved film, adapted from the back half of a novel the author had spent years litigating over. One can almost respect the sheer administrative grimness of it: fourteen drafts, a year of pre-production, over six hundred children auditioned, all to produce a movie that currently sits at fourteen percent on Rotten Tomatoes. The story concerns Bastian, a boy with a fear of heights, who returns to Fantasia to confront an evil sorceress named Xayide and a spreading force called the Emptiness. He loses a memory with every wish. This is, structurally, the most interesting thing about the film, and it is largely squandered on armored giants and a spy who looks like a startled umbrella.

The cast is uniformly white, which is simply what casting looked like in a German-American children's fantasy in 1990, and the film offers no comment on this, having no concept that comment was available. The female characters, the Childlike Empress and the scheming Xayide, function as archetypes rather than arguments. No romantic or identity subtext stirs beneath the surface. The Emptiness is a magical malevolence, not a stand-in for any environmental anxiety, and nobody in Fantasia has a thought to spare for the means of production. The film's moral, that compassion can undo a villain by giving her a heart, is a gentle fable of the sort children's cinema has dispensed for a century. It lectures no one. It merely hopes you will be slightly kinder.

What remains is a curious artifact. A franchise built on a book about the dangers of wishful thinking, undermined by a production that wished for three soundstages and received one. It is not a film with a message for our moment. It is a film with a message for 1990, delivered quietly, and mostly to children who have since grown up and forgotten it.