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There are several ways to interpret the film’s ending, specifically Bobby’s successful flight aboard the Radio Flyer. The first way, which is the simplest yet hardest to believe, is that everything happened exactly the way it is shown: Mike and Bobby drew up blueprints for a flying wagon with crayons and colored pencils and they built the craft out of spare parts and old junk. They then successfully gained enough speed going off the wishing point to get airborne, and Bobby, despite being eight years old with little to no aeronautic training, was able to not only pull the craft out of tailspin at a climactic moment but pilot it through the night to places unknown.
This is what we see happen in the film, with nothing but our grown-up incredulity to tell us otherwise. And the film even attempts to head this objection off at the pass via adult Mike’s narration, telling us that his mother couldn’t believe that Bobby actually flew away because she had lost the childhood perspective that makes magic real. The script’s so-called «seven great abilities and fascinations» posit that if a child believes in something, that belief makes it literally so. Thus, monsters are real, animals can talk, blankets provide an impenetrable shield, and kids can fly — but only if they believe that they can. When Bobby takes off from the wishing point, it’s meant to evoke the same wonder as the flying bicycles in «E.T.,» another film in which the purity of childhood is conjured in magical terms.
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