Look past its florid quest story – this fairytale is an outlier in a 1980s fantasy film canon that can still make me teary
I became obsessed with the 1984 film The NeverEnding Story through the power of scrapbooking. Despite missing this meta-textual fairytale when it was released, someone in my family home had clipped out the black-and-white production stills presumably intended to jazz up the entertainment listings of our local paper. I then Pritt Sticked these contextless images into my jumbo movie scrapbook, which ended up being a NeverEnding Story fanzine because I never added anything else to it.
I revered that tatty book. As the 1980s crawled onward in the sedate and rather culturally remote Scottish Borders where I grew up, I would periodically pore over these snapshots from an unknown fantasy world. They depicted a rock monster with a jutting Desperate Dan chin, a dapper adventurer in a top hat petting a giant snail and a wizened man with elven ears. This was the height of Dungeons & Dragons mania, so it seemed reasonable to assume that this mismatched band would embark on a quest to retrieve the magical cauldron or whatever.