The NeverEnding Story
Kids falling down: The Movie of the Book. Eat you heart out, Labyrinth and The Princess Bride.
An grieving orphan kid, bullied in school, escapes depression by furiously reading fantasy books and putting a thinly veiled expy of himself as the saviour of the world. Eventually, the fourth wall is broken and the title refers both that kid and the very audience of the film. You know, for kids!.
The inner story is the bog standard Western RPG main plot, a series of quest givers giving you the run around.
It starts when the empress summons the greatest warrior of the land for a quest for the solution of problem du jour: the Nothing is invading the world and must be stopped. Save us, Messiah!
First his horse drowns in the mud of the Swamp of Sadness, he couldn’t cheer up enough to keep his head above the sludge.
He visits a giant turtle allergic to youth, who sends him across the map. He is chased by a big bad wolf and rescued by Falkor, the furry dragon.
Using his new mount, he is taken to the Southern Oracle, not a Texan Larry Ellison. The oracle includes a pair of sphinxes with massive boobs. They sent him in another trip.
His mount is struck by lightning and he meets a rock giant, contemplating suicide for seeing his friends die in front of him.
He continues forward and meets the big bad wolf, which soliloquises over the political advantages of imagination and hope over TINA and the like. The wolf is then brutally stabbed to death.
Finally, the world is virtually consumed by the Nothing, but the kid reading the story uses the power of imagination to bring it back unscathed, and vanquish the bullies.
I assumed the ending was a metaphor for the end of the grieving process.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.