Half-baked analysis

In all the uproar over the remake of The Neverending Story, I keep seeing people lauding its "message," which is, I guess, "do what you dream," more or less, and that is the cheesiest (and possibly worst) thing about the movie. That's not what the story is about, okay? Remaking the movie and making the themes more compelling and less overt would be a good move. The Neverending Story is not about achieving anything; The Neverending Story doesn't have a moral. The Neverending Story is about using your imagination, for good and ill. What's evil in the novel is not what we would consider evil, not G'mork (although, as a servant of the Nothing, perhaps he would count...) or Xayide, but the Nothing. You can see this in the Childlike Empress; though she is the ruler of Fantastica, she does not condemn evil or praise good--what she fights against is the Nothing, against the thing that is destroying all of Fantastica, good and bad. And the Nothing is taking over Fantastica because people from our world are not using their imaginations--not creating anything. I forget, too, but I believe the Nothing threatens our world as well, because Fantastica is falling.

So while Bastian needs to obtain a kind of belief in himself in order to play his role in this story, that's not the point.

Look, it's been a while since I had to English major out on a book, but if I had to say what the book is really about it, it is about walking the line between imagination and reality. When you live too much in the dismal real world, that world itself suffers for lack of creativity, but if you live too much in a fantasy land, that world also suffers, even while the real world loses you--and you lose yourself. Creation is the theme of this book, filling the Nothing with Something over and over in an infinite number of ways.

It's not about achieving your dreams or whatever damn thing. It's about imagination and how that shapes you and the corner of the world you inhabit.