The page turner: "The NeverEnding Story" at 40

Back in 1984, The NeverEnding Story was the German film industry - newly flush with cash and confidence post-Das Boot, much as the British film industry was post-Chariots of Fire - responding to the successive, fast-flowing waves of family-friendly fantasy Lucas and Spielberg had initiated with Star Wars and E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial. Though drawn from locally sourced fiction (Michael Ende's book of the same name), it was essentially a mishmash of varyingly remembered childhood favourites - including but not limited to The Wizard of Oz, The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, Alice in Wonderland and The Singing Ringing Tree - couched as a paean to the consolations of literature and the wonders of the imagination. Operating with but a fraction of Spielberg's effects budget and Lucas's technological capability, future Hollywood recruit Wolfgang Petersen (caught between Das Boot and Air Force One) shows us a dreamy kid (Barret Oliver) escaping the cruelties of his bullying peers and the banalities of a school maths test by retreating into a surprisingly spacious school attic and losing himself in the secondhand book he's made off with. What we witness for the bulk of these ninety minutes is the rabbit hole this tome leads him down: events in a fictional kingdom ("Fantasia") populated by eccentric characters with eccentric make-up designs and old-school analogue puppetry with a hint of Mitteleuropean weirdness that may unsettle the very young and probably wouldn't be sanctioned in any comparable American feature. That's one difference that presumably helped The NeverEnding Story stand out on first release; another is that shrugging framing device. A young American protagonist would typically find themselves swept up and carried along towards adventure, heroism, self-actualisation. Something like that would happen in the NeverEnding sequels - for sequels there were - but for now this very European enterprise was content to cut back repeatedly to a mournful, lonely kid doing nothing more strenuous than turning the pages of a book.

That this is a family film made on the same continent as Sartre, Freud and Goethe is evident from a prevailing po-facedness, the scattering of abstract nouns ("the Sadness", "the Nothing") deployed as plot motors, the fact at least three-quarters of the film is unspooling within somebody's headspace, and a script that in spots sounds fumblingly translated into English so that the dialogue can be redubbed for overseas markets. Revisiting this Story as a grown-up, you can't help but feel something crucial is missing structurally, but you also understand on a subconscious level why the film beguiled as many early 80s kids as it did. Petersen, visibly looking to stretch himself after the necessary austerity of Das Boot, commandeers sets that go on for days and then dresses them in the manner of contemporary pop videos: you half-expect to see the sorry remnants of Ultravox emerging from the fog, or that the gallant young prince within the story (Noah Hathaway), conceived as a more resilient stand-in for our bookish hero, will encounter Nena, Germany's other notable pop-cultural export of 1984, while scrabbling over a hillside. (The Limahl/Moroder title song, keening and weedy and barely distinguishable from the composer's "Together in Electric Dreams", fits to a tee.) Never as slick as its American rivals, often as clunkily episodic as the formative classics it was regurgitating, it nevertheless retains a peculiar, dreamy charm, and demonstrates undeniable craft: the adaptable Jost Vacaro, Fassbinder's cinematographer on The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum and subsequently a key Paul Verhoeven collaborator, makes the late interaction between two kids in a darkened psychic space every bit as striking as the yammering rock monsters and soaring dog-dragons. It's a pity the European industries couldn't club together their dwindling resources and engineer more films in this vein: set The NeverEnding Story against those revoiced Luxembourgian digimations that now creep out to fill multiplex screens during the school holidays, and it holds up as a genuine sort of vision.

The NeverEnding Story returns to cinemas nationwide today.