I'm happy I grew up in the 80's and 90's. It was a great time to witness the original and inspired ideas of the 80's. I watched plenty of movies, some were kids movies, others were more adult and I probably shouldn't have been watching them.
One of my favorite movies that we had on tape was 'The Neverending Story'. It was such a great fantastic movie to watch. It totally inspired me, to write and to dream of making life, in general, an adventure. I mean, when I saw The Rock Biter, the racing snail, the bat and the amazing sets they built I was just blown away by it all. This was the age of Jim Henson and I was loving every minute of it!
I mean the scene where Atrau loses his horse in the Swamps of Sorrow, who can forget that?
The music was simply amazing as well. Every time a new bit of scenery is introduced a beautiful bit of music is unraveled. The scenes where Falgor is flying are great.
Nothing in the movie grabbed me more than Gnork, the wolf antagonist on the film. What a Jim Henson masterpiece. When he explained what Fantasia essentially was and about The Nothing, I was blown away. There's nothing worse you can do to a kids world then take away their imagination and creativeness. What a truly scary idea. When he discussed the possibility of growing into an adult and losing the ability to imagine and dream it really made me think about how many people lose that ability and embrace the horror of complacency of work, marriage and everything else life can bog us down with so we forget who we were when we started our lives out. Fantasia was the realm of human fantasy and The Nothing was people forgetting about their dreams, aspirations and worst of all their imagination.
The book takes that idea and really rolls with it and takes it further with another theme. The idea of losing yourself in fantasy so much that you forget about the people in your life that love and care about you. This theme served as a clever warning to us to not go to the other extreme and lose ourselves in fantasy so that we forget all our responsibilities and loved ones. I get the idea that we should strive to balance our lives with or creative imagination and out mundane day to day tasks and 'reality'. The other worlds/lands that the book delves into are unique and each has it's own story arc with characters coming from their own continuing stories. Each new land and adventure has a new thing for us to learn . Every time Bastian makes up a new adventure or land he gets more arrogant and mean, forgetting more memories from his life back home. There's this neat part where other people have entered Fantasia (in the book it's called Fantastica) and are just stuck spouting gibberish that over time can come out as every story ever written. They have completely forgetton who they were in 'real life' totally became characters in Fantasia and are now mindless zombies who can't escape. Wow, I have to give it to you Michael Ende, you know how to give a kid an existential crisis way too soon in their lives.
