In this film, the kid manages to save the princess’s life by naming her.
So he names her his mother’s name, which he shouts out of a window or something. But what was it? I could never hear it properly.
On this site… http://www.fantasien.net/tnes/misc/faq.html they say…
Bastian screams out a name for the Childlike Empress near the end of the movie. He gave her the same name as his his mother’s. What was the name?
While watching this scene, Closed Captioning says “[yelling]” when Bastian screams the name. If what was yelled was intended to be the same name as in the book, it is “Moon Child”.
After looking at several other sites as well, they all agree. The name is Moon Child, like in the book.
The name was Moon Child in the book, but I have my doubts as to whether this is what it is meant to be in the movie. In the book, Bastian does not name the Empress after his mother, but in the movie he does. Are we meant to believe that his mother was a hippie?
Your guess is as good as mine. From looking around quickly on the net, that seems to be the general consensus. I looked at about 5 different sites, and they all seem to be under the same belief. It has been a while since I’ve seen the movie. I’m currently looking for a sound byte of it, so I can make my own decision.
I always heard it as “Martha.”
Ok… I just found the sound clip here… http://members.tripod.com/~WestLee/sounds.html It is the one named “Bastian, Call my name!”
It is definitely Moon Child. Listen for yourself.
No it was Moonchild in the movie. As for the book I’ll have to go home and look it up but I thought it was his mother in the book as well. Just because she has a strange name doesn’t mean that she was a hippie, she died early so the name may mean something to him and is not really her name.
I don’t care what he named the girl, she was HOT HOT HOT
When I used to watch this movie (though I never read the book) as a child, I always thought that Bastian’s mother was from Fantasia. Don’t know why I thought that, but that was why the name Moon Child always made sense to me.
It’s definitely Moon Child. Or rather “Mooooooooon Chiiiiiiiiiiiiiild!!!”
He doesn’t actually name her after his mother. When it’s first mentioned that The Childlike Empress needs a new name, Bastian looks off into the distance and says “My mother… she had such a beautiful name.” (This is just about the only reference to his mother in the movie, but she’s a much more prominent element of the book, and Bastian’s grief for her is part of his inability to live fully in the real world.) But there’s no indictaion that he uses her name for the Empress. “Moon Child” is supposed to be something that he made up just for her. According to the book, at least, that’s the whole point of needing someone from outside Fantasia/Fantastica, as no-one from Fantasia is capable of creating anything new. The people of our world are the creators, and the people of Fantasia are our creations.
In the book, the name comes to him the first time he sees her face, as Atreyu enters the Ivory Tower and the barrier between the two worlds becomes thin enough for them to see each other for an instant. But that’s another story, and will be told another time…
Is Bastian related to Frank Zappa? His mother’s name is Moon Child.
She was TWELVE TWELVE TWELVE you sick bastard!
Word, Bouv. i was going to write just that when I read his post, butcha beat me to it.
By the by, the book is really great, and this is coming from someone who’s not a fan of fantasy-type literature.And yes, it is indeed “Moon Child”, although that’s translated from German, so who knows if the original was quite so out there.
I’ll second that. As is often the case, the book is superior to the movie version. The movie is a sort-of-OK adaptation of the first half of the book, and it’s not even the best half. The second half of the book is more complex, and more dark. Too bad it will probably never be adapted as a movie. What is needed here is a miniseries treatment, like they did with Dune.
I haven’t read the book, and I haven’t seen then movie in a long time, but… what about Neverending Story II (or whatever it was called). I saw it once and didn’t like it much, but did it come from the book, or was it just pulled out of thin air as a sad attempt to make more money on a successful film?
The second half was adapted as a movie. It was pretty bad. I hear the third one (which has nothing to do with the original novel whatsoever) was even worse.
I heard that the sequel was so atrocious that I avoided seeing it in the theater. It wasn’t until years later when it aired on a local TV station on a weekend that I decided to watch it.
Oh. Dear. God.
Like the third movie, the second movie bears absolutely no resemblance to the second half of the book. None. Different story, different character (both new and re-interpreted). On top of that, it was badly acted, badly directed, and the special effects were amateurish. It was an abomination. I still can’t understand why they chose to ignore a perfectly good storyline in the second half of the book in favor of something as moronic as they produced.
Like I sad, they still haven’t made the second half of the book into a movie.
It may have been “Moon Child”, for all I know, but it damn sure sounded like “Martha” to me. Or “Moooooon Piiiiiiieeee”.
It has, admittedly, been many many years since I saw the second Neverending Story movie, but I do remember it featuring the Bastian-makes-wishes-but-loses-his-memories plot, as well as a number of characters from the book like the evil sorceress. So I wouldn’t say it has “absolutlly no resemblance to the book”. It’s got at least a little…unless of course my memory of the movie has been corrupted by my more recent readings of the book, which is also possible.
It does have the idea of Bastian losing his memories with every wish he makes from the AURYN, and it does have Xayide, who is the main troublemaker in the second half of the book. But the memory loss plot is handled completely differently in the book, and Xayide is significantly different in the book compared to the movie.
Everything else, and I do mean everything else from the book’s second half was left behind.
I’ve never even seen the third movie, and like you, I’ve heard that it was worse than the second.