The Answer to a NeverEnding Story

Turn around, look at what you see.

The Southern Oracle would like to warn you, this post is about The NeverEnding Story, both the 1984 movie and the 1979 book. Spoilers abound if you are not familiar with either, but especially if you’ve seen the movie but never read the book. If you are confident, you may pass.

It was the summer of 1984. I was 9-years-old, sitting in a dark movie theater in Traverse City, Michigan with my dad and a bag of Twizzlers, and before me on the screen was a story that would begin to speak to me...and literally never end.

I was already a young boy obsessed with what the 1970s and ‘80s brought to the world for sci-fi & fantasy movies up to that point: films like The Dark Crystal, Superman II, E.T, The Secret of NIMH, and of course STAR WARS. I also loved to read books and write my own stories, so it was in this context that a strange little film from Germany called The NeverEnding Story touched a nerve in my very being. I saw the ad in the newspaper and this commercial on TV, and knew I had to see it.

I was also short and skinny with a bowl-cut mop of brown hair, so watching this movie’s main character Bastian (played by Barret Oliver) on that screen was like watching myself through my own Magic Mirror Gate.

I related to that character like no other, and wished that I too could create my own Fantasia and fly my own luckdragon.  And yes, I even wished I could chase my own enemies down an alley into a dumpster, as I was often picked upon by the occasional bully myself in those days.

For many who watch it for the first time now (including my own kids, who think the special effects look too fake), it may seem dated. In some ways it may be, but it’s one of those things where you “had to be there” to fully understand. Even for all of its '80s cheesiness, synthesized sparkle, whining and bad haircuts, The NeverEnding Story was nonetheless a classic fantasy of our times. It haunted our nightmares with dying horses and crumbling statue faces, depressed us with its bleakness, and provided us with a hero that ultimately failed at his quest. But it also gave us, as Tolkien has quoted, a “lifting of the heart,” as any good fairy tale does. I’ve always acknowledged its flaws, but I forgive them because of the strong impression it made upon me as a child.

To this day, I’m just as fascinated with the making of the film and the culture surrounding it as I am with the film itself. I still encounter people who grew up with the movie and don’t realize it was based on a novel, written by German author Michael Ende and published to great acclaim in 1979. The 1984 film adaptation only covered the first half of the novel, and it was the most expensive production of its kind in Germany at the time. The more you see how it was crafted with what they had, the more credit you have to give the crew for the intelligent choices that were made in adapting a nearly un-filmable high fantasy book. The pacing of the story, the editing, the journeys from bleakness to delight, balancing the humor and the terror, the animatronic creatures – it's all full of delightful metaphors and lessons for kids which I've always carried with me and laid the foundation for the kinds of stories I'm still writing today as an author.

But let’s go back to the ‘80s and my own personal neverending story. Exactly one year later in the summer of 1985, my family bought our first VCR and The Neverending Story was one of the first movies we recorded off cable TV, right in-between The Muppets Take Manhattan and The Last Starfighter on the same VHS tape.  I vividly remember laying on my stomach on the burgundy carpet of our family cottage in the woods in “Up North” Michigan, now 10-years-old and re-watching those opening scenes of the Rock Biter in the Howling Forest. The brooding musical score swelled as he spoke about the Nothing that was destroying his world. Meanwhile, a thunderstorm literally began brewing outside. A warm summer breeze rolled in through the screen door as I soaked in this cinematic story and was enchanted by it all over again, even on a smaller screen. I also remember hearing in passing that the movie was based on a book, but I never came across a copy of it anywhere, nor did I seek it out to read it. The movie was enough for me, at least at this point. 

As I grew up and entered the awkward season of adolescence, that VHS tape would still be played from time to time, particularly as I fought the urge to “grow up” at any chance I could get. The nostalgia behind that musical score and those clunky creatures stayed with me into my college years and beyond. It should also be noted that by this time I had shed the church-going of my childhood, for my family had stopped going there, and so had I. But that is another story and shall be told another time. 

After graduating from University of Michigan in 1997, a year later I moved to Vancouver Canada to pursue further studies in animation. I brought with me a plastic crate of VHS tapes, including my treasured and worn-out copy of The NeverEnding Story. Then one day, watching the tape again in my lonely Vancouver apartment, now as a 23-year-old, I noticed something about those opening and closing scenes with Bastian and the school bullies in the alley. Had I not walked through those streets just recently?  Upon further investigation, I discovered those sequences had indeed been filmed in the Gastown district of Vancouver. So naturally I went back to those streets and figured out where that particular alley was. It’s at the corner of Cambie and Water Street, pretty much unchanged to this day. Was this part of the reason why the film resonated with me so closely as a boy? Was it calling to me with a glimpse of my own future story, and where I would eventually live? (I like to think so.)

This was just the beginning. New to the city and with few people to talk to, I was wandering through the Vancouver Public Library looking for inspiration, anything to read or look at to pass the time. And there, in one of those old revolving book racks, was a paperback of the original NeverEnding Story novel by Michael Ende. In my head I heard the chiming of eight synthesizer notes, and I grabbed the book like Bastian out of Mr. Coreander's shop (only I didn't steal it, of course. I did use my library card).

Sitting in my dark apartment, I went through a few chapters each night. The first half of the book played out almost exactly the same as the movie, with only a few key differences. The biggest revelation came when it actually revealed what Bastian screamed out the window as his new name for the Empress. (Remember in those days when we didn't have the Internet to tell us anything, and our deep conversation at recess was 'what does he yell in that scene?' Even the closed-captioning on the TV didn't know....it just said [SCREAMING]. In case you are still wondering, in the book it's "Moon Child," and if you watch that scene again, that's pretty much what it sounds like.)

But the second half of the book was more of a complete surprise to me. Here in those pages were Bastian's "many other amazing adventures" which the movie's bizarre closing voice-over told about. He ended up becoming the ruler of Fantasia (translated as “Fantastica” in the book), and with no cinematic imagery to compare them to, I read about beautiful forests and deserts, tragic battles and betrayals, a lost city, a warm house, and most significantly, a life-giving fountain.

When I finally reached the end of the book and closed it, I sat silent for a very long time. Before too long, there were tears. No book had ever brought tears to my eyes before. It had struck a chord in me I couldn't put my finger on. Looking out my window, the sky was a warm shade of pink, and on some strange impulse I grabbed my coat and my camera and felt as if something was pulling me towards English Bay Beach. I still have these pictures which I took that very night, in December of 1998.

The mountains on the north shore were capped with pink snow and that same rosy glow reflected in the buildings along the inlet. It was a cold evening and extremely windy, and I can still remember the stormy chill in the air as I tugged at my coat to keep from blowing away. By the time I arrived at the beach the sun had merely become a stripe of light being pressed upon by stormy clouds, and there was a young couple there flying a kite.

I sat on a rock by the crashing waves, and in that moment with the cold wind blowing through my hair, something stirred within me as an important step towards my backwards/forwards walk with my belief in God at the time. 

In the years that followed, life would lead to me to encounter Christ and bring me back to the church, but that is another story and shall be told another time. 

When I read the book again years later from this perspective, I got a clearer inkling of why it may have resonated with me the first time. In particular was the scene of the life-giving fountain in one of the final chapters. After failing as ruler of Fantastica, being exiled from his kingdom, and going on a journey through the shadow of death, as it were, Bastian ultimately reunites with Falkor and Atreyu at a fountain gushing forth with ‘The Water of Life.’ He has lost all of his memories, his Fantastican gifts, and even his name. Atreyu and Falkor are there to guide him to the Water of Life, which speaks to him saying, 

‘I am the Water of Life,

Out of myself I grow, 

The more you drink of me, 

The fuller I will flow.

Drink! Drink! Do what you wish!’

And then…

“In this last moment, when he no longer possessed any of the Fantastican gifts but had not yet recovered his memory of his own world and himself, he was in a state of utter uncertainty, not knowing which worlds he belonged to or whether he really existed.

But then he jumped into the crystal-clear water. He splashed and spluttered and let the sparkling rain fall into his mouth. He drank till his thirst was quenched. And joy filled him from head to foot, the joy of living and the joy of being himself. He was newborn. And the best part of it was that he was now the very person he wanted to be.”

-Michael Ende, The NeverEnding Story

Reading this scene again reminded me of this…

But whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life. – John 4:14

In that moment, Bastian is essentially baptized, knowing his name and his true self as he was made to be. Whether Ende intended this as an author or not, my first experience of the ending to The NeverEnding Story (which does indeed have an end, as all books must) suggested to me an encounter with Christ when I didn’t even realize it. It awoke in me a yearning, a key to answers for questions I had forgotten how to ask. It was but one small step in my own faith journey that I would look back and see through my own Magic Mirror gate. It was almost as if I heard someone saying…

“Turn around, look at what you see.” 

But that’s another story, and shall be told another time.