3 out of 5

Director: Wolfgang Petersen

Neverending Story is conceptually awesome, and tosses in some great ideas at the start that unfortunately dont gel into an anything much more awesome. Bastians mom is dead. Hes picked on at school and single dad is convinced that its b/c kid is always dreaming. Get your head out of the clouds, he says. This connects with our kid selves, because we totally like dreams and fantasies, right? Anyhow, Bastian stumbles across a book called The Neverending Story which tells about the land Fantasia, where The Nothing is starting to devour everything… and as hes reading the book, Bastian starts to discover that hes part of the story and that he can help save Fantasia… What awed me originally is still true today: Fantasia itself is awesome. We glimpse characters that are just so cool to see (in pre-CGI land) and done impressively such that huge, frightening, giant creatures look huge, frightening, and giant. And the concept is still one of my favorites, that of the layered story, and the over-lapping story – tale within a tale but both are linked. Some cheesiness is forgivable in kids movies, and Ill admit that I could never get into Dark Crystal or Labyrinth (from the same era as this film, natch) b/c I preferred Neverending Story with its more firm grounding in real life (we continually return to Bastian reading the story). Alas, I just dont like the actual treatment of Bastians world or his weaving into the tale. Director Wolfgang Petersen has a heavy, German, directing style, and it shows up here, with Bastian over-responding to the story and the real ties of his emotions dealing with his family and life unclear in favor of an easily trumped motto of keep dreaming!. So it just never really makes you FEEL anything… as a kid or as an adult. But again, with that said, the effort but into Fantasia is awesome, and until we get into the less-than-succulent meat of the story, the look and concept keep you fully enveloped.