Last post I covered Curious George, this time I’m going to discuss the 1980s classic: The Neverending Story.
If you were born after 1990 or have been living under a rock, you may not be familiar with this movie, which is currently being re-made AGAIN.
The premise of the movie is simple: the main character, Bastian Balthazar Bux, is a young kid with a dead mom. He reads a lot. He’s awkward and gets picked on. He daydreams and doesn’t study math very well. He also uncovers this book, called “The Neverending Story”, and discovers that the book is aware of him reading it, and his presence is interwoven into the story in a bizarre self-referencing experiment of recursion.
Requisite Disbelief
For the most part, a movie that takes place in Fantasia, a place where every storybook character lives, you are expected to simply accept “hey, it’s totally feasible for a kid to be riding around on a flying dog-dragon.” It’s really not relevant to list them out since it’s in a fantasy world.
But even so, I find some issues that make me cringe and start boring my wife by ranting about it.
First of all, there’s the issue of distance.
Atreyu, the protagonist-by-proxy in the storybook, is told by a gigantic tortoise named Morla (“The Ancient One”) that he needs to go to the Southern Oracle. Atreyu asks how far south is the southern oracle. Morla tells him it’s 10,000 miles away. (For reference, 10,000 miles would be driving from New Jersey to Los Angeles and back, doing it again, and then driving out to LA and staying there.)
Obviously, Atreyu is bummed out because this is pretty much impossible, especially since his horse just drowned in the swamps he’s trudging through. He’s picked up by a gigantic Luck dragon (imagine a chinese dragon with a labrador head) named Falkor. When Atreyu awakes, Falkor tells him that he has flown him nearly the whole way, specifically saying “9,891 miles” of the total 10,000.
That’s 98.91% of the way there, which is a substantial leg of the trip. But let’s be real here: there are still 119 109 (Thanks shutterww!) miles left on Atreyu’s journey to the southern oracle. But the movie completely glosses over this!.
Seriously. I’ve watched this movie dozens of times in the past few months and I’ve looked for some possible lapse of time where fast travel could fit in, but nothing. Here is the sequence of events, from the moment Falkor declares the distance.
- Falkor tells him the distance
- Atreyu meets the dwarven scientist and his wench– I mean wife.
- Atreyu witnesses a knight in shining armor getting gunned down by the first gate (bear in mind that they are witnessing this through a telescope)
- Atreyu then immediately decides to try and attempt to run the gate,and climbs down the mountain. The scene cuts and he is at the gate.
- Falkor is being treated with some vaccinations / vitamins or something.
- Atreyu makes it through the gate, the dwarf is overjoyed.
- Atreyu continues on walking to the second gate, and then eventually to the Southern Oracle itself.
The entire time, Falkor is still at the dwarves mountain-house, so Atreyu is doing this entirely on foot.
The only possible explanations I can come up with is that either Morla, the Ancient one, was incorrect about the exact distance and was merely approximating it (given the 1.19% difference, that is a reasonable rounding). Alternately, Atreyu could have walked the whole 119 miles — perhaps he doesn’t really need to eat, or has enough food on him. A brisk non-stop walk of 5 mph would only take 23.8 hours (nearly a full solid day of walking) to make it 120 miles. Then, of course, there is the round trip…which they never show….
They could have easily dodged this issue by simply having Falkor say a more reasonable number: “9,990 miles” (even a 20-30 mile distance would be doable on foot in a short time — non-stop 5 mph pace would get him there in 4-6 hours.) Or, they could have just had the dwarf say “Oh, the oracle? Yeah, that’s 10 miles in that direction. Morla was rounding off to make it sound more intimidating. Yeah I know, he’s an asshole.”
Another thing that bugs me is that, when the Rockbiter, Snail-racer, and Bat-guy are discussing The Nothing, they specifically make it a point to explain that the nothing doesn’t leave behind a hole, or anything of substance — just emptiness.
When the nothing consumes all of Fantasia, which, according to Gmork and others, has no boundaries (sort of like: how long does it take to destroy an infinite number of books?), Atreyu is flying around with Falkor in space. You see stars in the background and asteroids flying around.
I can just accept that they don’t need to breathe in space — but what’s with the stars in the background? If Fantasia had no boundaries, then it should be theoretically infinite in size. If I also accept that the Nothing is able to decimate an infinitely large land-mass — why should we accept that there are STARS left behind, and not just empty blackness?
The final scene, when Bastian meets the Empress, after he screams out “Moonchild!” into the stormy night, it is completely dark. Finally.
It’s possible that the story intends that “Fantasia” is the universe (since there are plenty of stories about space travel) — but the movie portrays space as being the result of the Nothing. If space were intended to be part of Fantasia, then shouldn’t the Nothing be ravaging space as well? And if Fantasia really did include all of that limitless space out there, then why did Atreyu and Falkor spend so much time on the terrestrial portion of Fantasia, given the relative size compared to the rest of the space in the universe?
This inconsistency would have been fixed if it simply didn’t show stars in the background, and instead stuck with empty blackness. The viewer would have to presume that the few asteroids that were whizzing around were fragments of the terrestrial Fantasia, and that there was nothing beyond that left behind.
Oh, and one last thing.
Throughout the course of the movie, Bastian is in the attic of his grade school, reading his book. HALFWAY through the movie, school let’s out. The movie ends long after the sun set. Shouldn’t there have been people looking for him at that point? I mean, his Dad wasn’t exactly in touch with his son, but jeez! Schools didn’t follow up on truancy quite so much back in the 80s, but surely his dad would have realized “oh hey, my son never came home and it’s 9pm”. The movie never really provides any answers about this, but it doesn’t say that his dad ISN’T searching for him and calling the police.
Ok — next up on the chopping block is The Little Mermaid by Disney.
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#1 by walt on May 4, 2009 - 2:07 am
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um. 10,000 minus 9891 is 109, not 119. Not a significant difference, i just thought you should know.
The first time i watched the movie i thought the dragon said 9981, which would have been reasonable.
The Nothing and Fantasia not having boundaries was definitely odd, but what got me was when somewhere in the middle of the movie the southern oracle tells Atreyu that all that really needs to happen to save Fantasia is the empress needs a new name. After some flying with Falkor, it goes to a cut-scene of Bastion saying, “it’s a shame that they don’t ask me” and then he says: “My mother… she had such a wonderful name…”
I swear if his mother’s name was “Moon Child”… there was something wrong. Maybe she was a flower child and her parents took one too many acid trips. It’s almost as bad as the name Bastion. I mean, no wonder he gets picked on.
“No Dad, they’re unicorns, not horses….”
Yeah, you have bigger problems than bad math grades when your son says that..
I stumbled onto this website by chance but it was humorous to read how unrealistic and self-contradicting this movie was. I will probably continue to read your postings because they seem to be logically funny.
#2 by Aaron on May 4, 2009 - 8:48 am
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Glad you enjoyed it — thanks for the correction, I have noted it in the post!
His mother’s name is indeed “Moon Child” — the only reason I know this is for sure is because on the sound track, the song that they play during that seen is called “Moon Child” — and if you are listening for that name specifically when he screams it out the window, you can totally hear it.
I’ve had a bit of a lapse on posts lately, because I’m finishing up my last semester (see my most recent post) — but once summer starts I’ll start posting more regularly. Thanks for commenting!