Jesse’s Reviews > The Neverending Story > Status Update

The basic idea of Fantastica as Bastian interacts with it is enthralling. It’s a shared fiction that has a memory of sorts of all the children who have visited it as each one adds new kingdoms and histories.

Somewhere in this is story is a parable relatable to falling in love with a story and then writing yourself into it as a deeply unappealing self-insert… it’s more broadly relatable as losing one’s self in the act of imagination. As a metaphorical / metaphysical work, that’s pretty heady stuff for a kid’s book as it takes the time to show Bastian’s development.

Bastian’s love and sympathy for the Many Colored Death is so simply beautiful in a way that’s much easier to get away with in children’s books

The book exists in roughly two halves and the first - the time before Bastian arrives in Fantastica - is finished. The way his story weaves with the “book”‘s narrative is very clever and I loved the bit where the Childlike Empress had a showdown with the Old Man of Wandering Mountain.

I don’t know if I ever saw The Neverending Story in full. I know that I have seen scenes but I have no idea how close any of this is to the movie. But I realize now that some of my ideas about how a few of these characters look are wholly derived from how they were rendered in the movie, which is somewhat disappointing considering they are the few differences that I can actually pick out.