All About The Storytelling

Rating: 8/10 (13 May 2006)

You have to understand what's being made fun of here, in order to appreciate it.
The targets here are those dramatic fantasy movies that were failures, things like "Krull" and "The Dark Crystal", or those that took themselves perhaps a bit too seriously, like "The Neverending Story". The production values of the 'within the book' parts of this movie are deliberately placed at lower quality than those of the targets -- all part of the joke.
Nothing within the 'Princess Buttercup' story would be acceptable to a grown-up audience. So what makes this work is the transparent effect of envisioning this the way a ten-year-old would see it, not the way a grown-up would see it.
Added to this is the layer of the grandfather reading the story to the grandson. This is engineered to be the same thing as Reiner laying out the story to us.
So we have here a story that matters not at all; it's nothing without the device of framing the storytelling a certain way. It turns something utterly preposterous into something delightful and timeless.