The NeverEnding Story

Michael Ende tried to stop the film and lost. He and his publisher K. Thienemanns Verlag sought an injunction against producer Neue Constantin to have the offending scenes cut; the court accepted that the novel had been distorted but treated that as irrelevant, because the film addressed a young audience. Ende then took his name off the credits, calling the result a huge melodrama of kitsch, commerce, plush and plastic, a cross between E.T. and The Day After. The real gap is structural, not legal. Wolfgang Petersen tells only the first half of the novel, stopping in the middle of chapter thirteen; the second half became the rough basis for the 1990 sequel. Every creature was made in front of the camera. Brian Johnson ran the special and visual effects, Colin Arthur the masks and sculptures, Falkor among them. Shooting ran from 15 March to 15 September 1983 at the Bavaria studios in Munich Geiselgasteig, plus Spain and Vancouver. At around 60 million marks it was the most expensive German film to that point. A good fit if you count every creature built by puppet and mechanism, with no digital option available, as the strongest thing here. Not for readers of the novel waiting for Bastian’s adventures in Fantasia; the film ends exactly where the book’s story properly begins.