Skip to content ~ Michael Ende, author of The Neverending Story The 1984 German fantasy movie The NeverEnding Story, rated by many a classic of children’s cinema, is a story with multiple layers, but at its most basic, it’s an old-fashioned tale of good versus evil, where evil takes the form of “the Nothing.” At the time, The NeverEnding Story was the most expensive film ever made by the German film industry, with almost twice the budget of director Wolfgang Petersen’s prior film, Das Boot.