The white dragon fujur, the Morla turtle and all the fantastic universe devised by Michael Ende in The Neverending Story landed 30 years ago today in Spanish cinema screens a film that, with a budget of over 40 million, was once the biggest blockbuster of German cinema.
Filmed in mostly in the Bavaria Studios in Munich -and some outside Almería-, the film became a worldwide success and marked the imagination of a generation, thanks to a novel that was a best seller, translated into 27 languages, and fauna that are largely out of the head and hands of Colin Arthur.
The English artist, who had begun his career in film making faces apes 2001 , Space Odyssey , was hired by producer Bernd Eichinger then young, who had bought the rights to the novel, even before he joined the final project director Wolfgang Petersen. “I came to Munich with a team of four Spaniards. There was even a full script, or drawings, and started working on the novel “tells the specialist in makeup and special effects, during a visit to the studio that opened in Madrid in the mid 80s.
He two other design experts, Brian Johnson and joined IU Rico, and locked for seven months to shape the fantastic universe of the novel of Ende, before we started shooting.
This is made visible the famous story of Bastian, a boy who takes refuge from their problems reading a mysterious book that introduces you to the Kingdom of Fantasy, in which beings live like that dog-faced dragon on flying the warrior Atreyu, the Comepiedras monster or wise old turtle Morla.
“The first character we created was the Caracol Veloz. It came from my imagination. Once the design is accepted, the others have to adapt and continue that line, “Arthur, who at 80 years remains active and applying craftsmanship almost extinct from the digital avalanche explains. “Now it is becoming to them, for example in the new Star Wars”, says Victor Matellano, filmmaker and author of the biography of Colin Arthur, who has shot several titles with him, the last, the short film Glen English .
Disciple of Stuart Freeborn (the creator of Yoda) and winner of a Goya for Crack (1990), Arthur transforms the faces of the actors with makeup and prosthetics and make ‘animatronics’, dolls and puppets manipulated mechanically, from molds of clay and latex filling. After Caracol, the dragon came fujur, a showy structure 14 meters long, made of latex, scales, feathers and wool angora, and filled with a lot of c ables with tensioners that moved 20 puppeteers coordinated by a conductor.
De Rico was wrong with the drawings, the retouching and gave way.
If all that -Gmork wildlife werewolf, the gnomes Urgl- Engywuck and was instrumental in the success of the film, no less impact did the song composed by Giorgio Moroder and sung by Limahl, an artist unforgettable hairstyle, but which never again heard anything after that.
Neither child actors get very far. Neither Tami Stronach, the Childlike Empress, who did not return to filmmaking up to this same 2014, it has reappeared in a polaca- tape or Barrett Oliver, the protagonist child, yes rolled a title more in the eighties.
Much has also spoken of Michael Ende anger with those responsible for the adaptation of his novel. “I wish that they grip the plague. If it were in my hands, sink that movie at Vesuvius, “he went on to say, she says in her book Matellano
To Ende, 300,000 frames for the rights (150,000 euros at current exchange rates) pocketed, that tape was nothing but “a gigantic commercial melodrama based kitsch, plush and plastic.”
The writer refused to appear in the credits, although strangely it did so in the second part which premiered in 1990. In any case, it is clear they did not think the same as the writer nor the millions of spectators who filled the theaters, and Steven Spielberg himself, fan of the film, which was made with the original Auryn, the medallion with two snakes wearing Atreyu (Noah Hathaway) in the film. It is said that keeps it in a glass jar in his office.
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