Where Is Fantastica in 'The Neverending Story'?

From Neue Constantin Film and Warner Bros. Pictures' 'The Neverending Story' (1984)

Turn around. Look at what you see...

Forgive us for singing the oh-so-80s soundtrack to "The NeverEnding Story," the fantasy movie that takes place in the—sadly—fictional land of Fantastica. From flying luckdragons to enigmatic Sphinxes, this realm is truly as fantastical as it sounds. 

When Michael Ende penned the book on which the film was based, he leaned on the teachings of occult thinker Rudolf Steiner for inspiration. Steiner is a recurrent figure here at Places of Fancy. Anthroposophy, the movement he founded, has its fingerprints on filmmakers as diverse as Ari Aster, Andrei Tarkovsky, Jordan Belson, and Alexander Kluge. With "The NeverEnding Story," Ende visualized Steiner’s idea of moral imagination being able to forge the path to free will.

Another muse was his father Edgar, whose surrealist paintings gave rise to the Minoudjin, the city of ghosts, and the Spook City. Ende had vivid memories of his father's canvases, depicting dreamlike landscapes of floating monoliths, beasts, and the like. 

“I am standing on top of the image world of my father, so to speak," Michael once said. "I have tried to continue his artistic method within my own field, meaning the way he found his images."

Context was also everything in the formation of Fantastica. Ende grew up in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, a Bavarian town nestled among alpine peaks and dense forests, terrain that would echo through the Howling Forest and the Silver Mountains.

Later, living in Italy with his wife at Villa Liocorno in Genzano di Roma, he gazed upon the rounded hills of the Roman countryside. From that view emerged Morla, the colossal turtle mountain slumbering in the Swamps of Sadness.

For his big-budget movie adaptation, German director Wolfgang Petersen stayed close to Ende's childhood stomping ground. Massive sets were constructed at the Bavaria Film Studios in Munich for Ende's fantasyland, renamed Fantasia in the movie, including the Swamps of Sadness and the Ivory Tower. 

But those iconic shots of Atreyu galloping across endless plains on Artax? They were filmed in Spain's Tabernas Desert. The same goes for the memorable scene where he washes ashore; that took place at the volcanic cove of Playa de Mónsul in Almería.

Fantastica, it seems, was always meant to be a borderless patchwork of worlds. Hidden in the lines, written on the pages, is the answer to its never ending story.