The NeverEnding Story turns 42: the classic Michael Ende hated

The most expensive German production of its era and its author's fury

It was 1984 and German cinema was making its most expensive production ever: 'The NeverEnding Story'. 42 years on, Wolfgang Petersen's film remains a pop icon, but its creator, Michael Ende, never came to terms with it. He tried to distance himself from the credits; in the end he appeared only as "creator of the novel".

The book that wanted to be an impossible object

Ende dreamed of a volume with locks, embossed details and eccentricities. His publishers persuaded him to settle for two-colour printing —red and green— an edition still remembered with devotion. The paradox: the story he conceived as endless because imagination has no limits ended up lasting an hour and a half on screen. Some viewers left the cinema feeling cheated: "the neverending story… and we were out after an hour and a half".

The book's plot is darker and more existentialist —no surprise, since it was written by a postwar German—, with layers the film barely touches. Those who have read it highlight its grey, decadent tone, far from the more adventurous spirit of other young adult novels.

1984: the annus mirabilis of cinema

The release year also brought 'Terminator', 'Gremlins', 'Ghostbusters' and 'Once Upon a Time in America'. A crop now looked back on with nostalgia: "you left the cinema dazed, thinking 'wow, what a movie'". In contrast, the antiestéticar of a remake looms. Every so often panic resurfaces over a modern version that, according to the recurring caricature, would turn Fuchur into a transgender character and the Childlike Empress into a Canary Island drag queen.

The soundtrack and the horse in the swamp

Limahl's theme is an emotional magnet: eighties pop DJs say that whenever they play it, someone comes up to thank them with tears in their eyes. But it's not all love: the scene of Artax sinking into the Swamps of Sadness left more than one child with an anguish that lasts decades.

With 42 years behind it, the film has aged poorly in effects —"pre-CGI puppets", some say— but it retains an aura that digital productions cannot achieve. The question remains open: would a remake survive without breaking the original spell?