Cinema The NeverEnding Story

The NeverEnding Story is one of the unforgettable films for those who grew up in the 80s. Many will remember the iconic song from the film, sung by Limahal, which was part of the videos played at weekends on music chart television programmes, where many imagined flying in the skies with Falkor...

Wolfgang Petersen adapted Michael Ende’s children’s story for this charming fantasy film. It tells the amazing adventure of Bastian in "Fantasia". A world inhabited by a racing snail, a narcoleptic hang-glider bat., the warrior Atreyu, a Childlike Empress, the luck dragon Falkor, and Rockbiter. All this exists inside a book opened by Bastian in a bookshop. In books everything is possible even the advance of "NOTHING", a dark force. A magical film from beginning to end.

The NeverEnding Story was made even before the directors resorted CGI. So the fantastic puppet creatures we see in the film are real and were actually in the studio with the actors.

The director Wolfgang Petersen, who died in 2022, recalls in an interview: "It was the early '80s and, at that time, you did not have computers that could make all these types of creatures yet. We had to create all these beings and creatures, build them and animate them mechanically. For example, with the luckdragon Falkor, he's this huge creature that we had to build [around 14 meters]. You could actually touch it; it was not a computer animation.

It took about 15 people to animate this creature, but they were all invisible, of course. They had their strings to use as they were hiding somewhere underneath the costume and sometimes even under the floor. There was a little monitor they had where they could check their work. So, there was one person that was in charge of the movements of the nose, and there were two others in charge of either eyebrow (...).

It took a lot of work to have it come out the way it did on film, and I believe that's what gives this movie such a great quality that can be appreciated after all these years. The creatures were so real how they had to interact with the actors, it wasn't like they were just standing in front of this green screen and pretending. The actors had to work directly with the creatures." (1)

The special effects were under the tutelage of Brian Johnson. He began his early career working with Gerry and Sylvia Anderson on their Supermarionation productions Stingray, Thunderbirds and later, Space: 1999. Brian has won Academy Awards for Alien (1979) and The Empire Strikes Back, and also worked on Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Colin Arthur was the creator of the puppets and unique creatures of The NeverEnding Story. His work includes Jason and the Argonauts or 2001: A Space Odyssey, when he was a young make-up assistant, and later, Conan and Clash of the Titans, and also worked in the android of Alien.

The NeverEnding Story is still considered one of the best examples of artesanal special effects, although there are sequences where we feel it was made in another era, with its kitsch of outdated special effects giving it more charm.

Another curiosity, was the fact that Petersen decided to approach to his friend, Steven Spielberg, to get his thoughts on bringing the film to an American audience. With Spielberg’s assistance, the American version became seven minutes shorter than its European counterpart. Petersen gave Spielberg the original Auryn medallion used in the film, as a present and a thank you.

A film session organized in partnership with Cinemateca Júnior  that revisits one of the cult films of the 1980s. We can almost say that The NeverEnding Story was the Harry Potter of those who grew up in those years, in a film that reminds us that hope and dreams should not die, and that there is still a need for fantasy and imagination in this world.

_{(1) Rosy Cordero - The NeverEnding Story oral history: How 3 kids helped save the world. Entertainment Weekly, 18 December 2019.}

^{https://ew.com/movies/2019/12/18/the-neverending-story-oral-history/}