There are stories that should not be remade so much as finally completed. The Neverending Story is one of them.
For forty years, the world has carried a powerful but partial image of Michael Ende’s great work: Bastian in the attic, Atreyu on the plains, Artax in the swamp, Falkor in the clouds, the Childlike Empress waiting as the Nothing consumes Fantastica. Wolfgang Petersen’s 1984 film became one of the defining fantasy films of its era, and rightly so. It gave audiences images that stayed in the bloodstream. It made Falkor real. It made the Ivory Tower gleam. It made the Nothing feel like more than a storm. It made childhood grief, fear and wonder feel operatic. Yet it was never the whole story. It could not be. The first film ends at the moment the book truly turns inward: Bastian enters the world he has been reading about, receives Auryn, begins to wish, begins to forget, begins to become magnificent, and then begins to lose himself.
That is the opportunity now before See-Saw Films and Michael Ende Productions. The correct question is not simply how to remake The Neverending Story. The correct question is how to adapt Michael Ende’s novel at its full spiritual, psychological and mythic scale. The answer is not one film. It is not even two. The book wants a five-part structure, because the story is not only about saving Fantastica from the Nothing. It is about what happens after imagination is saved, when the wounded child becomes powerful inside it, mistakes authorship for entitlement, loses his memories one by one, almost becomes a tyrant, and must finally learn that the truest wish is not glory, beauty, strength, fame or rule, but the capacity to love.
Back in 2019, I had an old visual treatment called The NeverEnding Pentalogy. The five titles were simple and direct: Quest for Phantasia, Journey to the Oracle, Age of Balthazar, The Silver City, and The Water of Life. Looking at them now, after the official See-Saw announcement, they still feel right. In fact, they feel more right than ever. They split the novel at its natural pressure points. They preserve the beloved first-half adventure without letting it swallow the more profound second-half material. They give audiences the Falkor and Atreyu story they remember, then reveal the stranger masterpiece most viewers have never actually seen on screen.
The first major decision is naming. The book’s English translation uses Fantastica, while the 1984 film popularised Fantasia. The German original, Phantásien, has a different resonance again: older, stranger, more European, closer to imagination as a metaphysical country. For a new screen cycle, Phantasia is the best franchise-facing name. It carries the memory of the film without simply repeating it, and it restores a slightly more archaic, mythic charge. Quest for Phantasia immediately announces that this is not a cheap reboot. It sounds like a recovered saga.
The second decision is form. Ende’s book is not just a fantasy novel. It is a book about reading, authorship, escape, danger, healing and return. The original edition famously used two colours of text to distinguish Bastian’s world from Fantastica, and that formal idea should guide the films. The human world should have its own cinematic language: colder, flatter, more constrained, full of fluorescent classrooms, wet streets, grief-heavy rooms, narrow corridors and the dead air of emotional neglect. Phantasia should not merely be colourful. It should operate by symbolic law. Every place should feel like an idea made geographical. The Swamps of Sadness are not just swamps. Morla is not just a turtle. The City of Old Emperors is not just a ruined city. Each location must feel as though the inner life has become terrain.
The third decision is the hardest and most important: do not compete with the 1984 film by simply reproducing its iconography. Honour it, then move through it. The nostalgia is useful, but it cannot be the foundation. The foundation must be Ende. The first two films can carry the mythic adventure everyone knows; the final three must show why the novel remains deeper, harsher and more humane than its pop-cultural shadow.
Film I: Quest for Phantasia
The first film should begin in the human world with Bastian Balthazar Bux: imaginative, grieving, neglected, bullied, and spiritually alone. His mother is dead. His father is alive but emotionally absent, sealed inside his own sorrow. Bastian is not merely a bookish child who happens to hide from bullies. He is a child already living inside a form of Nothing. The world around him has thinned. Adults do not see him properly. School is hostile. Home is quiet in the wrong way. His imagination is not decoration; it is survival.
Coreander’s bookstore must feel like the first threshold. Carl Conrad Coreander should not be reduced to a comic old shopkeeper. He is a gatekeeper, a man who has seen what books can do, and a former traveller whose knowledge is visible in his refusal to explain too much. The book itself should be treated almost as a sacred object. When Bastian steals The Neverending Story, the act must feel morally wrong and mythically necessary at the same time. He does not simply borrow a fantasy adventure. He crosses a line.
The attic should become the human-world anchor of the first two films. It is dusty, hidden, forgotten, high above the school, cut off from adult order. Bastian opens the book there and begins reading about Phantasia, the Childlike Empress and the Nothing. This is where the adaptation should slow down. The court of the Empress should not be rushed. The delegation to the Ivory Tower should feel like all forms of myth gathering in distress: tiny messengers, bark creatures, night-hobs, physicians, impossible riders, beast-people, winged things, old things, frightened things. The whole realm has come to beg for help, and the Empress is ill.
Atreyu’s introduction should be solemn. He is not chosen because he is the strongest adult warrior, but because he is young enough to move through the story without the same corrupted assumptions as the grown world. Cairon gives him Auryn, and Auryn should immediately carry awe. It is not jewellery. It is not a magic shield in the usual blockbuster sense. It is a sign of authority from the heart of Phantasia, a symbol of protection and destiny, and ultimately a test.
The first film’s middle movement belongs to Morla and the Swamps of Sadness. Morla the Aged One is essential because she embodies the first philosophical face of the Nothing: indifference. She is not evil. She is tired beyond moral response. Her terrible wisdom is apathy. She does not care whether Phantasia lives or dies, and this is what makes her frightening. The death of Artax must remain devastating. It should not be softened, rushed or made palatable through irony. It is one of the great primal wounds of the story. A child-hero learns that sadness can swallow the innocent, and that love alone does not always save the beloved in time.
The climax of Film I should be Ygramul the Many. This is the right endpoint because Ygramul gives the first film a true cinematic monster while also moving the story into stranger mythic territory. She is not simply a spider or a beast. She is a swarm-consciousness, a distributed horror, a creature made of many bodies operating as one malice. Atreyu’s encounter with her introduces poison, teleportation, sacrifice, and the strange logic by which Phantasia works. When Falkor appears, the film can finally exhale. Falkor should feel like luck made flesh, grace after suffocation, the impossible rescue that arrives when the quest has already become too much.
Film I should end with Atreyu and Falkor alive, bonded and moving toward the Southern Oracle. Bastian, in the attic, should now be frightened by the fact that the story seems to know him. The final note is not victory. It is acceleration. The book has opened. The quest has begun. The child outside the story is no longer safely outside it.
Film II: Journey to the Oracle
The second film should begin in motion: Atreyu and Falkor crossing the vastness of Phantasia toward the Southern Oracle. This film completes the first half of the novel, but it should not feel like a repetition of the 1984 film. It should feel darker, stranger, more metafictional, and more severe. The clean structure is the Southern Oracle, Uyulala, the Wind Giants, the loss of Auryn, Spook City, Gmork, the return to the Ivory Tower, the Old Man of Wandering Mountain, and Bastian finally naming the Childlike Empress.
Engywook and Urgl can provide eccentric warmth, but the Southern Oracle itself must be overwhelming. The Sphinx Gate should not be treated as a mere effects sequence. It is judgment. It sees through people. It asks whether the traveller can withstand being known. The Magic Mirror Gate should be equally important, because this is where heroic quest structure bends inward. Atreyu does not simply face a monster; he faces the unstable boundary between himself, Bastian and the reader. Uyulala, the invisible oracle, should perhaps never be embodied at all. She should be voice, song, intelligence, air, riddle, echo. Her revelation is simple and enormous: the Childlike Empress needs a new name, and only a human child can give it.
From this point onward, the film becomes a pressure chamber around Bastian. He knows. He refuses. He cannot accept that he is being summoned. This is where the attic scenes should intensify. He speaks aloud and the world inside the book seems to hear him. He reacts emotionally and the story seems to answer. The line between reading and responsibility begins to collapse.
The Wind Giants should mark the destruction of ordinary adventure momentum. They are not villains with motives. They are forces, vast and ancient and almost idiotic in their scale. Their quarrel scatters Atreyu and Falkor, knocks Atreyu from the sky, and causes the loss of Auryn. The film should let this feel like total failure. Atreyu has gone where he was told to go. He has learned the cure. He has done everything demanded of him, and still the world is falling apart.
Spook City and Gmork should be the black heart of the second film. Gmork is one of the most important figures in the entire work because he gives the Nothing a human-world function. He explains that the beings swallowed by the Nothing become lies in the human world, and that lies are how people are controlled. This is not merely fantasy lore. It is the moral and political engine of the story. A world without imagination becomes easier to manipulate. A child without stories becomes easier to flatten. People who lose the ability to imagine truth become vulnerable to falsehood.
Gmork’s death should remain grotesque and unforgettable. Atreyu reveals that he is the chosen hero. Gmork realises too late whom he has been speaking to. He laughs, dies, and then his jaws clamp onto Atreyu’s leg as the Nothing approaches. This is gothic horror. Falkor’s rescue and the recovery of Auryn should feel like salvation pulled from the edge of annihilation.
Then comes the true climax: the Old Man of Wandering Mountain. This sequence is where the new adaptation can become formally extraordinary. The Old Man owns a book also called The Neverending Story. The Childlike Empress forces him to read it aloud. As he reads, the story begins again. Bastian sees that if he does not intervene, everything will repeat forever. This is the franchise confronting the danger of its own repetition. A remake that merely circles the old film is the Old Man reading the book again. A true adaptation is Bastian speaking the name.
When Bastian cries out “Moon Child,” the moment should not be played as a simple triumph. It is terror, surrender and birth at once. He is no longer only a reader. He has entered responsibility. The film should end in darkness with the Childlike Empress and one grain of sand, the last remnant of Phantasia. All that remains of an infinite world is a single particle waiting for a child’s imagination.
Film III: Age of Balthazar
The third film is where the new cycle truly separates itself from every prior screen version. This is the Bastian film. Not Bastian as reader, not Bastian as rescuer from the attic, but Bastian inside Phantasia, remaking himself through wish after wish while unknowingly paying with his memories.
The film begins with creation. Bastian, now in Phantasia, receives Auryn and the command written on its reverse: Do What You Wish. This phrase must not be treated as a simple invitation to pleasure. It is the most dangerous sentence in the story. It sounds permissive, but it is actually a spiritual trial. The film should first let the audience feel why Bastian would be tempted. He has been lonely, ashamed, bullied and bereaved. In Phantasia he can be handsome, brave, strong, admired and central. He can become the person he thought he needed to be in order to be loved.
The early passages should be wondrous. The grain of sand becomes Perilin the Night Forest. The Desert of Colors appears. The world renews itself through Bastian’s imagination. This is where the visual design should become lush, almost impossibly rich. The audience must understand the seduction before they are asked to judge it. Bastian is not a fool for wishing. He is a wounded child discovering agency for the first time.
Grograman should be the centrepiece of Film III. The Many-Colored Death is one of the great unfilmed figures of the novel, and his world gives the third film its major mythic architecture. By day, Grograman rules the desert. By night, he turns to stone and the Night Forest grows. He and Perilin exist in a mysterious reciprocal order. This teaches Bastian that Phantasia is not a private playground. It has laws. It has balances. It has ancient rhythms that predate his arrival. Bastian can create, but he does not yet understand creation.
The gift of Sikanda, the sword that must leap from its sheath of its own accord, should feel magnificent and ominous. It gives Bastian the image of heroism before he has earned the wisdom of it. He begins to accumulate symbols: Auryn, Sikanda, beauty, strength, renown. The title Age of Balthazar belongs here because “Balthazar” is the part of his name that sounds kingly, grand, almost magian. Bastian Balthazar Bux begins to prefer the mythic middle name to the vulnerable child behind it.
The memory-loss should unfold subtly at first. He forgets a street. Then a school detail. Then a small fact about his father. Then his mother’s face becomes harder to summon. He does not notice because Phantasia keeps rewarding him. This is the essential tragedy of Film III: each wish appears to heal him while quietly separating him from the life to which he must eventually return.
Atreyu and Falkor should re-enter near the final movement, but their role has changed. They are not carrying the quest while Bastian reads. They are now observing Bastian from inside the same world. Atreyu sees what Bastian cannot. Falkor senses unease under the splendour. The film should end with Bastian moving toward greater public glory, perhaps toward Amarganth, the Silver City. He is not yet monstrous. He is still sympathetic. But the audience should feel the danger. He has begun to mistake being admired for being healed.
Film IV: The Silver City
The fourth film is the fall. It should be the most politically and psychologically charged entry in the cycle. Bastian has power now. He has status. He has stories. He has admirers. He has begun to believe in the heroic image Phantasia reflects back at him.
Amarganth, the Silver City, should be one of the most beautiful locations in the entire series. It is the city of stories, memory and public imagination. It should feel lyrical, ceremonial, built from water, light and narrative. This is where Bastian’s gift becomes social. People listen to him. They ask for stories. They celebrate him. For a child who felt invisible in the human world, this adoration is overwhelming. It is also dangerous.
This is where the adaptation should show the ethical problem of invention. Bastian does not simply create wonders. He creates dangers so that he or others may triumph over them. He engineers mythic situations in order to generate admiration. The Smerg episode should be handled with seriousness: a dragon created to be defeated is still a living consequence. The Acharis and Shlamoofs should be even more disturbing. Bastian pities beings who suffer under shame and transforms them into chaotic winged clowns, but the act is not pure kindness. He changes them according to his own discomfort. He solves pain by overwriting identity. This is exactly the kind of material that makes Ende’s book more adult than its reputation suggests.
Xayide should not be introduced as the source of Bastian’s corruption. That would weaken the story. She is not the cause; she is the opportunist. She sees the wound already open. She flatters him. She tells him that Atreyu doubts him because Atreyu cannot accept his greatness. She turns insecurity into imperial logic. Her castle, Horok the Seeing Hand, should be a major image: a hand-shaped fortress with watching windows, ruled by a sorceress whose power over empty things mirrors the emptiness growing in Bastian himself.
The march to the Ivory Tower must not feel exciting. It should feel wrong from the first frame. The audience has already seen the Ivory Tower as the sacred centre of Phantasia, the place of the Childlike Empress, the axis of the realm. Now Bastian approaches it as a conqueror. The absence of the Childlike Empress is crucial. Her throne cannot simply be seized because she is not a ruler in the ordinary sense. Bastian’s desire to crown himself emperor reveals that he has misunderstood the realm entirely.
Atreyu’s resistance should be heartbreaking. He is not trying to defeat Bastian. He is trying to stop him from becoming lost forever. The battle between them should hurt because the friendship is real. Bastian wounds Atreyu. The Ivory Tower is destroyed. The centre does not hold. Film IV should end there, or very close to there, with Bastian victorious in the most desolate sense. He has won the image of supremacy and lost almost everything the image was meant to protect.
Film V: The Water of Life
The fifth film is the return. It should be quieter, stranger and more emotionally severe than the others. After the spectacle of the first four films, the final entry should gradually strip the world down. Bastian has had the quest, the oracle, the glory, the city, the sword, the followers and the throne-dream. None of it has saved him. Now he must descend.
The City of Old Emperors is the correct opening movement. This is one of the most important unfilmed places in the novel. It is inhabited by human beings who came to Phantasia, used up their memories through wishes, and could no longer find their way home. They are not villains. They are warnings. They are what Bastian will become if he continues. This sequence should be disturbing but not cruel. It should show the end point of fantasy without return: play without meaning, power without memory, imagination severed from love.
Argax, the monkey who oversees the City of Old Emperors, can carry a grotesque, bitter humour. He should frighten Bastian because he understands him. He knows the pattern. He has seen human children become emperors of nothing before. This is where Bastian realises that Auryn has not been granting him fantasies for free. It has been taking the very things that make return possible.
Dame Eyola should be the emotional counterforce to Xayide. Xayide fed Bastian’s grandeur. Dame Eyola feeds his remaining humanity. Her House of Change should feel warm, strange, maternal and temporary. She should not become a replacement mother in a simplistic way, but she should awaken the memory of being cared for without performance. With her, Bastian begins to understand that his deepest wish was never to be powerful. It was to be capable of love.
The Minroud sequence with Yor should be almost ascetic. After the colour and abundance of earlier films, the mine should be dark, mineral, quiet, severe. Bastian is now searching for the image that will lead him to the Water of Life. By this point he is reduced to his final memories: his father and his own name. To continue, he must give up even the memory of his father. This is the hardest wound because the father is the human-world reason the whole story must end in return rather than escape. Bastian’s adventure is not complete until he can go home and restore the broken bond grief has frozen.
The final loss is his name. This is the last terror. A child who began by feeling unseen becomes a magnificent hero, then an almost-emperor, then a wanderer, then a nameless soul. The Shlamoofs’ final harassment should not merely be comic. They are the consequences of his careless transformations returning to mock him. He cannot outrun what he has made.
Atreyu and Falkor’s return is the answer to the whole pentalogy. Bastian cannot save himself alone. He lays down Auryn at Atreyu’s feet, and the three enter Auryn together. The Water of Life asks Bastian’s name and whether he has completed all the stories he began. He cannot answer. He has not completed them. This is the great moral reckoning of the story: imagination creates obligations. To begin stories is to become responsible for them.
Atreyu gives Bastian’s name for him and promises to complete the stories he left unfinished. That promise is the emotional key. Friendship carries Bastian across the threshold he cannot cross alone. The Water of Life allows him to return, and he brings some of it back with him. He returns to his original form. He is no longer ashamed of it. He goes to his father and tells the story. In telling it, he restores his father from grief. The fantasy does not replace life. It returns him to life with the ability to love it.
The Coreander coda is essential. Bastian confesses that he stole the book and lost it. Coreander denies owning it. Then he reveals that he too has been to Phantasia, and that the book has likely moved on to someone else. This is the perfect ending because it closes Bastian’s story while preserving the endlessness of the title. The story is complete, and the story continues. The book has gone where it is needed next.
That is the structure. Five films, each with its own dramatic identity. Quest for Phantasia is the call and the first ordeal. Journey to the Oracle is revelation and intervention. Age of Balthazar is wish, beauty and the beginning of forgetting. The Silver City is fame, manipulation and collapse. The Water of Life is repentance, love and return.
This is not artificial stretching. It is the natural shape of the book when treated seriously. One film cannot hold it. Two films would still compress the second half into a summary. Three films would likely overbalance toward the familiar first-half adventure and underserve the fall and return. Five films allow the story to breathe as a true pentalogy: outer quest, revealed responsibility, intoxicating authorship, moral catastrophe, healing return.
See-Saw Films is unusually well placed for this because The Neverending Story does not need a factory. It needs taste, patience, literary seriousness and emotional intelligence. It needs producers who understand that spectacle is only useful when attached to inner life. Falkor must fly, yes. The Ivory Tower must shine. The Swamps must grieve. The Nothing must terrify. But the true adaptation lives in Bastian’s transformation from lonely reader to false hero to humbled human being.
Every generation deserves its own journey into Phantasia. The way to give this generation that journey is not to merely repaint the 1984 memory. It is to begin there, honour it, and then keep going. Keep going past Moon Child. Keep going into Auryn. Keep going into the wishes. Keep going into Grograman’s desert, Amarganth’s stories, Xayide’s manipulations, the ruined Ivory Tower, the City of Old Emperors, Dame Eyola’s house, Yor’s mine, the loss of the father-memory, the loss of the name, Atreyu’s promise, and finally the Water of Life.
That is the film cycle waiting inside the book.
That is the NeverEnding Pentalogy.
