The Never, Ever, Ever Ending Story: Part One

When I look back on my childhood and movies that shaped me, there are a few that come up quickly that made me the person I am today.  I took in the heroic behaviors of the leads, the roguish but overall benevolent behavior of the scoundrel, and the dastardly behaviors of the villains.  Throughout everything I picked up on extremely common themes, such as that the strong should help the weak, people work better as a team, and that it's okay to be afraid, but don't let the fear control you.  However, they also opened my eyes to things that I only really appreciate as an adult.

The original Star Wars movies absolutely blew me away, because up to that point I never really imagined all the strange and wonderful things that could be in space.  It wasn't just huge weapons the size of moons and swords made of light that blew my mind, it was all the different worlds they traveled to and what they could look like.  You might have a floating city over a gas giant, an entire planet of ice, or a habitable moon.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit gave me a fresh appreciation for the hard work that goes into making an animated film.  Until I looked at other mixes of live action and animation (looking at you, Space Jam) I didn't get just how much effort needs to go into making something like that seamless, from the live actors to the voice actors to the animators to the musicians...it's mind-blowing.

From movies I learned that it's important to have hobbies, because you never know when you'll be presented with an opportunity to take what other people view as "meaningless" or "silly behavior" and turn a rich life out of it, like Matthew Broderick's character in Wargames (granted, that movie also taught me that I could accidentally cause nuclear wars), a stage magician's training could help the allied forces win World War 2 in a documentary about Jasper Maskelyne, or that BMX racing could be the foundation of an entire town like in the movie Rad.

...that last example didn't really stick with me through life.

But the movie that always stuck with me, that taught me about needing to persevere when things get hard, about the dangers of getting swallowed up in feeling bad or sorry for myself (something that actually helped when I started feeling the affects of depression later in life), and even something simple like the importance of reading was The Neverending Story.

I loved this movie so much as a kid.

Now, I'm going to do my own retrospective look at the movies later to see what worked and what didn't (a warning, you'll be likely to see me enraged when I get to the third one), but I want to take a look at something I never knew existed until now.  Something that I would have never known to look for if I hadn't found it by accident.

Something that cost me a dollar and ninety-nine cents in a clearance bin at a video store.

Heaven help me.

Now, I really, really want to give this series a fair shake.  I'll admit, I'll probably be a bit biased because of how highly I hold the original (and to a lesser extent the second) film.  From a time before CG, from a time before fancy computers and covering actors and stuntmen with ping pong balls to track their movements, we had a movie that had me convinced you could film a giant luck dragon flying through the air and even through city streets.  You could have a giant tortoise who could sneeze a kid off his feet.  You could have shimmering cities floating alone in space after The Nothing destroyed everything else.

To start off on a high note, this is the first thing you see as the title sequence for the first episode starts:

That...is extremely well drawn.  I also have to say I really like the idea behind this opening because there's no floating text, there's no voices explaining the story, there's just Bastian receiving the amulet (AURYN if I remember correctly) from the Childlike Empress, and then he's riding Falcor and seeing all of his unusual friends including the talking tree Bark Troll (sigh), the gnomes, the rock biter (and sadly his wife and son), the racing snail, and even shows us what the villains of the series look like, including Xayide from the second movie.

One thing catches my eye, though.

I don't remember Atreyu having green skin or blue hair.  Let's double check.

Yyyyeah.  Not sure what happened there.

The title of the first episode is "The Tears of Sadness" which I can't tell is a brilliant name or an absolutely goofy name for an episode.  I suppose it depends on how it ties to the plot, because I thought "Attack of the Clones" was a great title for section of a film trilogy until I actually saw the movie.

The episode opens at a waterfall in Fantasia, where a small creature in a blue hood screams and seems to be suddenly turned to stone.  We shift from the falls to a faucet in the real world where Bastian's "protagonist sense" suddenly goes off and he darts off from the kitchen, leaving behind his breakfast, knowing that something has gone wrong in the story.  Somehow.  Despite the fact that at the moment nobody is reading it.

I don't remember Bastian having the mystical ability to know when he has to abandon everything to go read a book, but maybe I'm just not remembering it right.

Bastian arrives at the book shop where he finds a note from the owner saying he had to step out.  The letter, taped to the front door I might add, simply tells Bastian to head in and make himself at home and have an apple.  It's a good thing nobody else read that note or there might be some stolen books by the time the owner got back.

Bastian travels through the book to the home of the Childlike Empress where the citizens of Fantasia are pleading with her to take action because "evil is spreading across the land like a flame."  Apparently the "turned to stone" curse has affected individuals and entire tribes of creatures across the landscape, which Bastian takes to mean has some kind of connection with the strange sound he heard in his head telling him to come to the land.

Look out, Batman, we might just have a new "World's Greatest Detective."

The Childlike Empress tasks Bastian with the job of hunting down the evil, which prompts both him and the people go "wait, him?  He's just a kid!"  However, she is the Empress, so they go along with it.

Bark Troll (sigh) and Falcor show up to help, and the three fly off to find the source of the trouble.

As an aside, I want to point out that the designs for the creatures in the Childlike Empress' chamber are really well done.  With a cursory scan I can see a lanky creature that has a mane that looks like fire, a three-headed orc-like creature, beings with snouts and horns...it's an entire menagerie to rival that of the Cantina scene in Star Wars.

We get a pretty neat scene where the characters fly silently through the landscape of Fantasia.  There's a part of me that felt it could have used a little bit of dialogue, but for an introduction to the world, it's surprisingly effective, since Bastian and Bark Troll (sigh) both show wonder and amazement at the world around them.  The animators get to show off their stuff here, showing us massive cities, craggy peaks, crystal cliffs, and finally a forest (complete with waterfall, somehow) at the top of a mountain peak.

I don't know how that waterfall exists, but this is a world where a swamp will actively suck you in to kill you if you feel at all depressed, so I'm not going to question it.

They land to rest, but Bastian stops Bark Troll from drinking any of the water when they watch it transform what appears to be a mix between a My Pet Monster and a Popple into stone after it has a drink.  They take a sample of the water and leave to seek out the gnomes (Engywook and Urgl) and we get a pretty neat scene change that looks like someone took hold of the screen and peeled it back like someone turning the page of a book.  Considering the basis for the series, that's extremely clever.  We even get the rustling sound of paper being turned as it happens.

At the house of the gnomes, the two denizens inside dispute which is better, modern science or old mystical efforts.  The wife states that her potions can grow hair, turn things invisible, and cure hiccups...which I'm actually pretty sure modern science can also do these days.  However, what science can't yet do is shrink a boy and his tree friend down to just the right size to fit inside a gnome's house, which is what the wife's cookies apparently do.

Our heroes present their discovery about the water to the gnomes, who immediately agree to help.

If I had a complaint so far, it's that so far I haven't really seen Bark Troll do anything but complain and stumble around.  He trips and falls while standing still, complains about being thirsty, complains about being small, complains about what it takes to turn big, and then melts off his own finger by sticking it into a potion.  I was never a big fan of him before, but this really isn't helping my attitude towards him in the least.

Bastian, utilizing the telescope device from the first movie (I'll admit, I got giddy when I realized they were using it), realizes that some of Xayide's giants are drilling into a rock near the fountain where all of the waters of Fantasia come from (which, I'll point out, is shaped like four serpents pouring water into a giant scaled well with draining holes at the bottom).  Some strange liquid comes out of the rock and mixes with the water, but further investigation stops when a scream comes from the hut.

Bastian and Engywook rush back to find that Urgl has been transformed to stone, but Bark Troll states she didn't drink any of the water, she simply "looked at it."  Engywook tries to puzzle it out and peers at the water, but right when he states he sees it and figured it out, he too is also turned to stone.

...I'm going to admit, unless there's some creature in Fantasia that's a mix of sea monkeys and Medusa, I have no idea what's happening here.

Bastian and Bark Troll decide they need to do something about the giants, and Bark Tree gets the brilliant (?) idea to take all of Urgl's potions and mix them into one "mega-potion" to use against them.  The fact it doesn't explode immediately upon being mixed is a disservice to everything I ever read involving magic potions.

After Falcor drops them off nearby, Bastian and Bark Troll wind up chased by one of the giants into a small cave where they find a huge underground pool with a ghostly wailing sound coming from it.  Inside the pool are... um...

...okay, I have no idea what the heck that's supposed to be.

However, the creature is willing to explain itself.  Apparently the pool is full of creatures called Acharis, which are "the most repulsive creatures in Fantasia."  He states, and I quote, "so repulsive are we that we dare not even look at each other."  Now that's ugly.

"We alone know the bottomless depths of misery and despair."

Their fate is apparently to remain in this cave "sobbing into the pool of tears."  That's right, that entire underground lake consists solely of tears.  When asked what someone would see if they looked in the water, the creature replies, "In the light you will see more torment and misery and sorrow than you or any other living creature could bear."

So, to break this down, the liquid that flows into the "water of life" consists of nothing but tears that come from creatures so miserable that to even look into the tears is to see the essence of torment and suffering that these creatures go through.

...man.  I mean, some of the plots of Super Mario Brothers Super Show and My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic is out there, but...

And, I mean, Unico fought a sentient marionette powered by rage, but...

This is awesome.  That's ingenious.  That's something that absolutely belongs in this world, and I'm flat-out stunned I haven't heard anybody use an idea like that yet to any kind of level of this story.

Bastian and Bark Troll are confronted by giant killer robots with buzz saws and Xayide herself, and they attempt to bluff their way out of the confrontation with the treat of Bark Troll's special potion.  Xayide looks the two over carefully, then gestures with an off-handed manner, looks away, and instructs her robots to destroy them.

Xayide don't bluff, kids, and she'll always call your own bluffs.

Bark Troll drops his potion and it lands in the water, spilling out and changing the color of the liquid to a rosy pink.  Xayide flips at this, and accuses the two of ruining everything.  Before her robots and her magic can destroy Bastian and Bark Troll, the Acharis all emerge from the pool giggling their head off and transformed into... well, into...

...into the inhabitants of Wackyland, apparently.  I'm sure one of them emerged as the "last of the dodos."

The swarm of creatures easily outmaneuver the robots and drive Xayide to bring the whole cavern down on her own robots.  Bastian and Bark Troll (sigh) manage to escape, and find that the water is no longer contaminated by "the tears of sadness," and will in fact counteract the effect on any previous creature that was transformed.

Back at the Childlike Empress, she thanks Bastian for once again saving the day, and I really think she's growing overly fond of the boy, because for a moment I swore she was giving him her childlike best at "come hither" eyes.  Is the Empress doomed to always be childlike, or is she just now "childlike" until she gets older and she'll get a better name?

There's a bit of humor at Bark Troll's expense as Urgl chases him for ruining all of her potions (the ones, you'll note, that happened to save her life and the world, but hey, how dare he take a risk like that to save their entire world), everybody laughs, and Bastian finds himself back in the real world as he closes another chapter of the book.

The Good:

The creature design is brilliant.  Each creature is uniquely drawn, there's no "stock" characters that show up repeatedly, and there's details about each one that make you want to see it closer.  Maybe it has wings on its head, or its claw tips are yellow, or it has that third eye you didn't notice before, but there's no wasted character designs.  This does leave Bastian and the Childlike Empress looking slightly out of place as the only humans (well, okay, there's Atreyu and Xayide, but one has a completely bizarre color scheme now and the other is wrapped in some pretty tight-fitting robes to show off her figure), but in this world it works.

The story was also extremely clever!  When you have swamps that kill through depression and a large body of water known as "the Sea of Possibilities," you have to stretch past your standard fantasy story and reach for something that's pretty far out there, and this initial episode does just that.  You have a conflict between new advances and tradition, you have both being extremely helpful (the telescope helps them find what's happening, the potion saves the day in the end), showing the need for a proper balance.

The world itself was also dazzling.  The thing I remember the most about the first movie was the sensation of Falcor flying around and seeing the landscape whiz past Atreyu (and later Bastian).  This gave some of that same feeling, especially with how well played the silence of the characters was as they looked out at the world around them.

The Bad:

There's something just a little troublesome about the fact that the magic potion completely changed the Acharis into entirely new creatures, essentially exterminating an entire race of beings, even if they were completely miserable at even existing.  Though, if transforming them was such a benefit to their well-being, was it just that nobody knew they existed, or had they remained hidden for so long that people forgot?  A small line there would've added to the story, I think.

Plus, there never really was a clear explanation about why she was assigning Bastian to the job of "save the world" when, as even he pointed out, he is just a child.  But hey, if he didn't, we wouldn't really have much a show, would we?

Bark Troll was annoying, but he's the bumbling sidekick so I guess it's allowed.  I mean, he's still better than Toad.

Overall:

I have a confession to make.

I expected this to be much, much worse than it was.  As people who know me know I hated the third Neverending Story movie and figured the franchise was dead and buried.  I didn't know this series existed, and I only found it because I was pawing through some terrible movies in a bargain bin at a clearance closeout in a store I don't even really like.  But to see that it survived somehow as a cartoon that aired on HBO...I feel pretty good about it so far.

I mean, sure, maybe the next episode will be awful, and even Mario and his friends had one decent episode, but I'm actually hopeful that this will continue on.  I'm walking away from this tonight looking forward to the next episode.  There's only three to deal with on this DVD, but even if the other two absolutely stink, a 33% success rating is still pretty good for a series I've watched.