I already checked IMDb, no luck.
In The Neverending Story the boy reading the book calls out the name of his mother to give the Empress a new name. It’s impossible to hear what he says. Does the book say?
Anyone know?
This question has come up before in Cafe Society, so I will just reprint my answer here.
You’re right that it is nearly impossible to hear what Bastian shouts in this scene. I’m severely-to-profoundly deaf, so I always use closed-captions when watching a movie. For both the video and the DVD, in the scene where Bastian shouts out the name, the captioning reads only “[YELLING].” This doesn’t really help clear up the confusion.
I’m a better than average lip-reader, and for the purpose of replying to this question in an earlier thread, I took out the DVD and jumped to the scene to see exactly what Bastian yelled. I went so far as to go through the moment frame-by-frame, which is a relatively easy thing to do with most DVD players nowadays.
Conclusion: There is a flash of lightning at the moment Bastian begins calling the name, and there is no doubt in my mind that the first syllable of the name Bastian is calling starts with an “M.” The visime (visual phoneme) is unmistakable, and does not have a correlate with any other sound in English. The flash of lightning lasts long enough for me to see the beginning of the second syllable. The visime I see here correlates either with the “ch” sound or the “j” sound…both sounds have virtually identical appearances to a lip-reader…the difference is in the voicing, which is not always apparent to a lip-reader.
In my opinion, the vowel sound in the first syllable is ambiguous. It sounds a lot like the /u/ sound, as in “room”, but it could also be an accented /o/ sound, as in “roam.” Considering that Bastian speaks in a fairly neutral American accent throughout the movie, I’m more inclined to say that the vowel sound here is /u/.
The vowel sound in the second syllable is much clearer. It is the dipththong /ai/, as in “time”, which would be phonetically written (as best as I can render without the use of an IPA font): /taim/.
So in my mind, there are four distinct possibilities for the partial phonetic description of what Bastian shouted in the movie (Note–the phonetic alphabet’s designation for the English “ch” sound" somewhat resembles a blend of the letters “t” and “s”, and for the “j” as in “jelly” sound somewhat resembles a blend of the letters d and z.):
- /mu-- tsai–/
- /mo-- tsai–/
- /mu-- dzai–/
- /mo-- dzai–/
For comparison, “Moon Child” would be phonetically written as /mun tsaild/…again, my lack of an International Phonetic Alphabet font here means that the name wouldn’t appear exactly like that in an IPA font.
Given that the name “Moon Child” is what Bastian uses in the book, this leads me to favor the second possibility listed above as for what Bastian may have shouted. It seems to me that the movie did indeed use the name “Moon Child”, but took some steps to deliberately obscure what Bastian shouted. Why the director felt it was necessary to do this is open for speculation.
Wow! That’s amazing. What is the visual clue to differentiate /m/ with /b/? Is it a timing difference or tongue placement? Sorry for the hijack *Roadwalker but this is really interesting.
They are both bilabials, true, which accounts for their similarity. /m/ is a bilabial nasal sound, while /b/ is a voiced bilabial plosive (the unvoiced bilabial plosive is the /p/ phoneme). It is the plosive aspect of /b/ and /p/ that I can often see while lip-reading those particular sounds, especially if they are in the initial position of words.
I find it strangely difficult to describe exactly how I see the different sounds while lip-reading. To me, most people tend to curl their lips more when saying a word with the initial /b/ or /p/, compared to when they’re saying a word beginning with an /m/ phoneme.
Despite all that stuff about how beautiful his mother’s name was, Bastien does indeed yell “Moon Child.” So, either that info was a red herring, or Mommy was a hippie. You should really check out the book. One of my favourites, and I’m not even a big fanatasy fan.
Yes, yes, I see how hard it is to get what Bastian is saying.
But the real question is, “Why do we park on a driveway and drive on a parkway?”
:rolleyes:
You got your damn horse back at the end of the movie, why don’t you just ride over and ask the Emperess what her name is?
:p:p:p
This thread is stranger than the rock-biter’s tonails.