The book of The Never Ending Story is a parable about the power, both good and bad, of imagination.
Dreams, it relates, are beautiful, precious, and dangerous - we are heartless to ignore our fantasies, but meaningless fools to lose ourselves in dreams and ignore what we care and those we love.

The movie, in true Hollywood style, glossed over evils to portray unobtainable ideals. The sequel was an ugly distortion. There has been an animated kids' series on HBO that has kept with the storytelling aspects of the book, if not the ethical ones.
no one told me about a 3rd