While hiding from bullies in his school's attic, a young boy discovers the extraordinary land of Fantasia, through a magical book called The Neverending Story. The book tells the tale of Atreyu, a young warrior who, with the help of a luck dragon named Falkor, must save Fantasia from the destruction of The Nothing.
This movie contains 39 potentially triggering events.
The opening scene involves direct upsetting emotional abuse of a child. He expresses vulnerability to his father and is immediately taken aside and intensely criticized for this perceived weakness.
The horse dies, but comes back to life in the end. There were rumours that the death was real, but the horse did not die in real life. It was even given as a gift to the main actor.
Bullies chase and catch the protagonist. There's a brief moment of restraint (they even pull his head back by the hair) but this situation resolves very soon, and in a way that is more cartoonish than uncomfortable.
The main character discovers that the characters in the book he's reading are aware of his presence, and they break the fourth wall to talk to him. Within the fiction, this is all something that's actually happening and not a delusion, but the situation may be uncomfortable for people who have similar delusions.
There's a recurring theme where the protagonist reads a book, and the characters in the book slowly become aware of him which is very unsettling for him. Near the end, the theme expands to mention the viewer of the movie as well, but only in theory.
MAJOR: A man is killed by laser beams, and we see his charred face. MINOR: A character is shown with bloody wounds on a few occasions, but these are mostly just the SFX "battle damage" variety with only one closeup of an especially bad scrape near his collarbone.