The NeverEnding Story

The NeverEnding Story (Die unendliche Geschichte, 1984) is Wolfgang Petersen's family fantasy that you can watch online on iFILM. Ten-year-old Bastian ducks into an old bookshop to escape the bullies and walks out with a strange leather-bound volume.

The moment he opens it, the pages come alive. He reads about Fantasia — a realm of racing snails, a flying luck dragon named Falkor, and a Childlike Empress whose kingdom is being swallowed by a force called the Nothing. A young warrior, Atreyu, sets out to save it, but he can't do it alone: the reader, Bastian, has to believe the tale is more than ink on paper. The deeper he reads, the clearer it becomes that the story is waiting for him.

Adapted from the novel by German author Michael Ende, the film comes from Petersen, who would later make Das Boot and Troy. He built Fantasia with practical sets and animatronics, not a single frame of computer graphics — which is why its handmade charm hasn't aged in forty years. Giorgio Moroder scored the theme song. Stream The NeverEnding Story (1984) online on iFILM.