Running away from school bullies, 10-year-old Bastian hid in an old bookstore, where he found a mysterious book decorated with ornaments. Opening it, Bastian found himself in a ghostly fantasy world of running snails, flying dogs, wingless Dragons of Fortune, mischievous elves and a walking quarry named Kamnekus.
But the magical land of Fantasy and its ruler, the Girl-Empress, is threatened by a terrible attack called Nothing, generated by “unfulfilled dreams.” Only the young warrior Atreya and the power of the imagination of the extraordinary dreamer Bastian can save Fantasy …
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I first saw this film on New Year’s holidays in the very beginning of the 90s. This story captured me, fascinated, intoxicated, carried away, frightened, moved. I found myself in the wonderful world of fairy-tale creatures, brave heroes, and these heroes were children just like me. I believed in this world, immediately and unconditionally. The impressions were so vivid that I probably walked away from watching for more than one week, remembering the Stone Eater, the kind-hearted dragon of luck Falcor, the super-speed snail, the boring Morla, the terrible messenger of darkness Gmorg … You can understand what a tremendous impact this film had on me. And for a long time I dreamed of swamps of sorrow and flying on a white dragon. And after the film began to be erased from memory, individual flashes, the brightest moments, have been preserved in the brain to this day. And maybe in the heart. Because then I loved this movie with all my heart.
I wanted to revise it. After all, then I did not know that ‘The Endless Story’ was an adaptation of the book by Michael Ende, that the film is considered the standard of fantasy, that it is the most expensive and effective film project in Europe at that time, that the creator of the legendary ‘Submarine’ Wolfgang Petersen was filming it, but what am I then knew about the movie !? It was not the cinema that admired me, but the fairy tale. Now I wanted to reconsider and understand why this is the standard, whether the film is really effective, how it looks now, and whether it can still be left among the best. There are a lot of adults ‘how’ and ‘why’, realistic, pragmatic.
I really didn’t want to revise it. I wanted to keep this film in myself, as a bright childhood memory, as a vivid fragment of time, about which I hardly remember anything. I did not want to be disappointed, as I was disappointed in so many films that impressed me then. I didn’t want the feeling of nostalgia to get the better of my mind and sink my sober look at the film as a work of art in pink sugar clouds.
But I knew I would review it anyway. Let it be! To be disappointed, so disappointed in everything! I was not disappointed. No, of course, I did not stand still in front of the screen and did not fall into the abyss of fantasy and dreams, but previously unnoticed nuances were revealed, other criteria for assessment appeared, which, meanwhile, did not change at all. And again, no longer a child, I say – we have before us a standard of fairy-tale cinema, for children and adults, an ideal adventure film.
The fact is that, from early childhood, they begin to methodically and deliberately rob us. Parents start, educators and teachers continue. And then we rob ourselves. We are stealing childhood. ‘Stop hanging in the clouds! Think about the future! See things for real! You are no longer a child! Don’t whine! men don’t whine! Grow up at last! ‘ But it is childhood that distinguishes man from animals. God or someone there made a person’s childhood long, so that a person could feel his connection with higher powers, plan, fly in, travel around. Animals strive to grow up as soon as possible, they do not need childhood, it prevents them from surviving. But why do we create conditions for our children to survive and still steal from them the happiest moments of life? Childhood is so short, but at the age of 10 we are already running away from our childhood, it seems to us that being a child is a great shame.
And then we try to reclaim lost time by taking away from our son or daughter a book about Robinson Crusoe, sitting down for a video game or identifying a disc with favorite cartoons bought for a child into our collection. And films like The Endless Story bring back childhood. This movie pulls your childhood out of the subconscious, reveals its most hidden corners, you begin to look at the invented world through the eyes of a child, with the grown-up eyes of a large, unshaven, but still a child. This is the main value of this tape. Adults, we are well informed that this is an animatronics doll, how its eyes are controlled, and we know how far the technology for creating special effects has gone. But when we watch ‘Endless Story’ we don’t think about it. Because the dragon of luck here is exactly the dragon of luck, not a doll. It was created not by cult masters, but by the imagination of children. And if he was invented by an adult, then he definitely managed to translate his childhood fantasies into reality.
This is why this is the favorite movie of Steven Spielberg – the great child who has made his childhood dreams come true on screen all his life. That is why Wolfgang Petersen, who directed the intelligent and serious Submarine, took this film and turned it into a movie adored by children of all countries. Because they found in themselves a child reading a fantastic story with a flashlight under a blanket, afraid to enter a dark room, because a terrible wolf always sits there and confident that if it rains outside the window, it will rain all over the world. This is childhood. ‘Endless Story’ brings us back to childhood again and again, if we have grown up, and visually embodies it, if we are still children. The story The Little Prince has the same effect in adults.
Adults shoot philosophical fantasy, the child does not have any questions about what ‘nothing’ is and where Fantasy is located on the map. They draw a snake swallowing an elephant, and dad thinks that a hat is drawn. This film cannot be buried in, it does not have the task of explaining. It must be accepted unconditionally, as children do.
No, of course, the film is not devoid of a certain psychology. The child’s mother has died, and he closes in his world. And in this world anything can happen and in any way, and the absorbing nothing is loneliness, the connection with the mother severed at such a tender age. Each hero here can be explained from the point of view of psychoanalysis, but is it necessary? After all, psychoanalysis does not exist in the world of children. Everything that the child does not understand, he replaces with fantasy. And the film demands, makes them understand what children feel, demands from parents to give children the opportunity to grow up in due time, and demands from children to dream, fantasize, read, believe in their dreams.
This is a great movie. I know that the author of the book did not like it and failed at the box office, simply because the world of this film does not obey the laws of life and even the laws of art. Children, after watching this film, will understand everything that they need to understand. Adults will not understand everything. But they can try. To do this, Petersen perfectly solved a grandiose, mystical problem – he made a movie the way a 10-year-old child would have made it. Previously, this was a rare phenomenon, now, when cinema has become the lot of only very adult and calculating people, it is almost impossible. Therefore, watch ‘The Endless Story’ – children and adults, on New Year’s Eve and just like that. Dream. Go back to childhood!
Info Blu-ray
Video
Codec: HEVC / H.265 (68.0 Mb/s)
Resolution: Native 4K (2160p)
HDR: HDR10
Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
Original aspect ratio: 2.39:1
Audio
English: DTS-HD HR 5.1 (48kHz, 24-bit)
English: Dolby Digital 5.1
English: Dolby Digital 2.0 (224 kbps)
German: DTS-HD HR 5.1 (48kHz, 24-bit)
German: Dolby Digital 2.0 (224 kbps)
Subtitles
English-SRT, German-PGS.
