When people refuse to enjoy stories and imagination, they do not learn to be good people in reality, nor do they learn to distinguish truth from lies. The health of one world depends on the health of the other. For the world of stories isn’t merely an “escape” from reality. And what it says, particularly at its climax, about the vital connection between fantasy and reality, is worth noting. So much for the first movie, but that’s only the first half of the book. Though it goes against everything he considers possible, though he is terrified and ashamed, Bastian enters the land of Fantastica, gives the Childlike Empress her new name, and becomes the savior of the world that is The Neverending Story. And that someone happens to be Bastian Balthazar Bux. Through many adventures, joined by a beautiful Luck Dragon named Falkor, Atreyu learns that the only way to cure the Childlike Empress is for someone from the real world - our world - to give her a name.
And if she dies, all of Fantastica will cease to exist. For as she weakens, the horrible Nothing takes over more and more of the magical land of Fantastica. But then, in one of the greatest fantasy twists ever, Bastian finds himself becoming a character in the story!Īt first the story-within-a-story is exciting enough: the quest of a heroic 10-year-old “greenskin” named Atreyu to find a cure for the illness that threatens the life of the Childlike Empress. This is a mind-blowing children’s fantasy-adventure which we read, at first, through the eyes of a lonely little boy who has stolen the book from a used book dealer and gone into hiding in the attic of his school. You’ll have to take it up with the author (who died in 1995, by the way). So maybe there’s a hint of “clap your hands if you believe in fairies” in it. Which is a theme I’ve been harping on ever since I started writing for MuggleNet! But it’s also about the way the magical world of make-believe - the world that exists in stories - depends on people in our world to keep it going. This book is (well, partly) all about names. If you think that’s a cool name, there are more where it came from. I don’t remember the sequel very well, but I loooooved the original movie when I was a pale, flabby, cowardly boy of around 10 years old, just like the story’s hero: Bastian Balthazar Bux. This 1979 German best-seller (original title Die Unendliche Geschichte) crossed the Atlantic when I was a child and became, among other things, the basis for two movies.
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