The Neverending Story

Released: 1984
Fantasy, Drama
Starring: Noah Hathaway, Barret Oliver, Tami Stronach
Director: Wolfgang Petersen
Running Time: 94 minutes

The breakdown:
One of my favorites when I was a little kid, this is a fantasy movie of how anyone can have a big impact on the universe and beyond through reading.

This movie is based on a German novel written in 1979 by Michael Ende.  Basically a kid, who's mothers death has caused his father to be a workaholic, runs to a bookstore for relief from being chased by bullies.  In this bookstore, the owner tells him of a wonderful, but dangerous book he's reading called The Neverending Story.  The boy is intrigued and steals the book, runs off to his school's attic, and reads it for the rest of the day and all night not realizing he is becoming part of the book.  In this fantasy world he reads of (which is made up of humanity's hopes and dreams as explained in the movie), an empress who is very ill and the world she lives in is being consumed by The Nothing (this has been explained later in the movie as human apathy, denial of childish dreams, and cynicism.)  The Nothing is quite scary really,  pieces of the planet just start to cloud over, then a terrible wind comes, and soon huge sections of (the fantasy world) Earth just pull away from itself.  Very effective to me as a young child and even now as an adult.
Anyway, the empress calls on a young brave person, Atreyu, to find a cure for her and stop The Nothing.  If he can't succeed in this quest no one can.  He has a vast array of characters he runs into on his quest.  Some worth noting are Gmork, the werewolf who wants to eat him since The Nothing has summoned him to stop Atreyu (pretty scary), Falkor, the big white cute Luckdragon, who wants to help, and Artax, Atreyu's trusty horse who meets an unfortunate end (that always always makes me cry!)
Atreyu has to pass through this huge gate of the Sphinxes' gaze and then to the Magic Mirror Gate.  Once he reaches this, the boy in our world begins reading a description of himself and where he is located and throws the book across the room in disbelief.  He begins to wonder if somehow the characters in the book know of his existence.  He reads on and realizes they really are talking about him.  He can save this fantasy world if he chooses a name for the empress.  He chooses "Moonchild" but I never realized it.  The first time I saw it, in the theaters, and every time since I thought he chose his mother's name (which I thought would've been touching).  You don't know what his mom's name was, but I assumed he picked a girl's name for the empress.  He yells out the name out a window during a really bad rainstorm so it's hard to understand what he says at all.  I actually like my idea of his mom's name instead of Moonchild, but whatever.
This movie is so good I left a lot out to discover on your own if you haven't seen it.  And if you haven't seen it yet, you are missing out a really great story.

I give it 5 out of 5 ticket stubs because it never talks down to children, it's appealing to all age groups, and I love the amount of imagination it took to write this and produce it.  Plus I'm a sucker for symbolism and dissecting it.
Note:
The author of the novel said that this movie deviated so far from his book that he either wanted them to change the name or halt production.  Neither one of those things happened so he sued, but lost.

I've never read the book but I really want to since I discovered this was based on a book, and the lack of approval from the author.  Interesting thing is, the movie only covers the first half of the book (and obviously there's a lot of differences between the two), so there's a lot more story to go.