Normal second part, in my opinion, is neither better nor worse than the first. I haven’t read any books in this series, so I can only judge by the films themselves. As in the first film was a lot of naive, stupid and childish, and here it is plenty, but this is built on a kind of charm. The first thing you want to praise and admire is a completely brilliant work on costumes, makeup. The image of a human bird is something amazing, he normally moves his beak when he talks, he has an anatomically correct combination of wing and arm, he even has digitigrade legs (animal, two-knee). All other creatures are also perfectly created, but there was no graphics yet, everything was done by hand, live. Flights, landscapes, towers, the beauty of a fairy tale - this is the strength of the film.
Now for the minuses. Plot. The boy rubs the book again and flees from reality to a fictional world. There he and a friend first get from a good castle to a bad one, then hang out with the black queen in a carriage and then back to a good castle. All! A one-and-a-half-hour film with space that allows for everything imaginable, and that potential has been left largely untapped.
Lots of crazy moments:
- Why does a book dealer deliberately encourage a child to steal a book? What does he bring up in him?
- In the fairytale kingdom again some crisis, and the hero has no idea what he faced. It's as if he doesn't remember that it's the same book with the same villain.
- Bastian has an amulet that gives all the power. He can do anything imaginable. He could solve another problem with Nothing in a minute, and he instead makes up the steps one by one, wonders where and what to get, how to remove the belt of invisibility ... While building his own transport, he asked that the dragon be smelly. Dude, you sniff yourself, not your enemies. To fight the giants, he could summon any weapon one could wish for, and he asked for a can of paint??? Idiot? I was frankly annoyed by a character using unlimited power so ineptly. You could have decomposed a bullet into atoms, vaporized a gun, and turned a bottle into snowflakes, but you didn’t. You don't really care about humanity.
So just as the visual side is nice and colorful, so is the content itself.
That's a sad note, by the way. The lead actor Jonathan Brandis then starred in a huge number of films and TV series, received a statuette “Young actor”, and then in adulthood suddenly drank and hanged himself at 27. What he lacked for happiness, he did not explain.