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Der Struwwelpeter is a popular German children's book. It comprises of ten illustrated and rhymed stories, mostly about children. Each has a clear moral that demonstrates the disastrous consequences of misbehavior in an exaggerated way. Writer/director Fritz Genschow adapted Hoffmann's book to the big screen. He made a career doing such films, he had done Hansel and Gretel and would go on to adapt Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and other family films. Der Struwwelpeter, however, is weirder and darker than the Grimms' tales. They are heavy morality lessons in which children are burned to death, starved to death, or have their thumbs cut off. In Hoffmann's world the punishment usually far outweighs the crime. Genschow provided a happy ending: through the wonders of reverse action children are brought back from their fiery deaths, their thumbs are reattached, and their misdeeds undone through the power of St. Nicholas and some sort of Christmas miracle. (via forcesofgeek.com)

The story of a man destroyed by love.

In a world out of balance, the fateful symbiosis between a chestnut and a mushroom takes on a journey through the dark and toxic wasteland to find other living beings and a better place to live.

The Grimm Bros. tale of the brother and sister who wander into a witches' house, but told with a more adult slant (in other words, lots of nudity).

Nine-year-old Max Topas wakes up much too late one morning and finds that his parents and sister have vanished without a trace. Monsieur Quidam, a peculiar stranger, appears just at that ...

At midnight, two elves help a pair of shoemakers in distress by making shoes. They make it a condition that they are not watched. When the cobblers do it anyway and then send them the matching clothes, they stop working but continue to help the cobblers.

Travelling salesman Gregor Samsa wakes to find that he's been transformed into a giant insect. This particular Franz Kafka adaptation is seen from Gregor's point of view, continuing to explore themes of alienation, family duty, and the absurdity of modern life as the Samsa clan cope with how to go on with the situation at hand.

The old Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel (1900-83) imagines a movie plot, set in Toledo in the future 2002, about the fantastic adventure of three actors, who play him and his friends, the painter Salvador Dalí (1904-89) and the poet Federico García Lorca (1898-1936), and their search for King Solomon's table, a mythical artifact capable of revealing the past, present and future.

Once upon a time, there was a brother and sister named Hansel and Gretel who get lost in the forest. The father searches actively his children with the help of the Herb Fairy Marie. The lost siblings wander around for a while, and then they find a house of gingerbread, biscuit and chocolate. A witch kindly invites the children, but behind the sweet temptation lurks danger ...

In the Forest of Hearts, a little, sweepity, swoopity, swappity, sweet unicorn is born. But even though everyone is very lilacly-loving to it and constantly feeds it with sweet lucky clover, the little critter does not behave unicorn-like at all. It just keeps saying no, so soon its family just calls it uNOcorn. One day, the uNOcorn breaks out of its cotton candy world and sets off to NOWHERE. On the way, he unexpectedly meets a raccoon that refuses to listen (HUHcoon), a watchdog that doesn‘t seem to care about anything (SOWHATchdog), and princess that always talks back (PrinceYES). The four of them make a pretty good team. Because even being stubborn is much more fun together.

Johanna is just twenty years old but struggling with her boring and aimless existence. Disturbing visions start the day she gets fired from her job. Soon Johanna is carried off into a different world beneath the city where people live in a parallel universe full of darkness and magic rituals. The denizens of this world are inspired and guided by a mysterious woman, The Mistress. Drawn into her cult through an extravagant initiation ceremony, Johanna encounters fascinating characters: People like Simon, the collector, with whom she embarks on an obsessive affair. As Johanna plunges deeper into the occult her old world slowly collapses...

Who doesn’t sometimes dream of being able to turn back time? With the help of an enchanted brooch, a homely woman in an advertising agency skyrockets to success in her firm and becomes the boss’s wife. Everything seems possible until her rival discovers her secret…

Silhouette animation based on the tales of Baron Munchausen. “This film, primitive in technique, is contemporary with Miss Reiniger's first silhouette film The Flying Coffer, shown by the Society. Mr. Felgenauer's design is individual.” - The [London] Film Society, 1928.

Girl gets transported back in the past and makes changes to the direction in her life

Sailor Marat carries a great burden. His whole village condemns him since his wife and many fishermen were washed off his boat in a mysterious sea storm. Ever since then the sea has vanished. One day, Marat returns to his village, obsessed by the idea of making the sea return and so the dead. He begins rebuilding his shipwreck in the middle of the desert, dragging it towards the endless horizon. Only his last close friend Balthasar, and Tamara, the sister of Marat's deceased wife, believe in him. Tamara, deeply in love with Marat, who repulses her, knows from a fortune teller that maybe not her dream but his might come true. One morning Marat wakes up by the sound of water - the sea has returned, ready to take what belongs to her...

A tender and visually imaginative story about how children process tension and seek emotional balance in a world shaped by adult emotions.

A young maid enlists supernatural help in order to escape her past.

Many, many years ago, there lived a miller with his beautiful daughter. He lied to his king, telling him that she could spin straw into gold. The young woman was immediately taken to the king's castle and told that she must spin the straw into gold by the next day or she would die! After the door closed behind her, a little man entered during the night, who was skilled in the art she had been praised for...

An old donkey resolves to break away from the unbearable hardships of working for a fat miller. By and by, he recruits three more unsatisfied animals and convinces them to accompany him on his way to Bremen where they want to become musicians.

In a bleak future, a righteous police officer, one of the few who still take their job seriously, is seriously injured. Soldiers take him to a research laboratory, where they want to turn him into a supercop with superhuman powers and super-fast reactions. But the whole thing has a side effect: he loses all his memories. When he manages to escape from the lab, he tries to find out who he once was, and he has only one goal: to find and punish those responsible for his condition!

Poor but confident and resourceful tailor David trusts, after killing seven flies in one swat, he's a match for any challenge and sets out to prove himself in the wide world. After luck and cunning help him deal with giant Lothar, he arrives at the castle of petty king Ernst, who is ruled by constant migraine and his ambitious, manipulative court counsellor Klaus, who desires to succeed by winning brat princess Paula's hand and claims to be the only saviour who can rid the land of three supernatural dangers.

An adaptation of the famous fairy tale.

When the crew of a bankrupt cargo ship gets stuck on board for months, isolation breeds pressures that sink the men into a sea of madness and terror.

Marie, her father and her little brother live in an underground bunker hidden deep in the woods. The World as we knew it no longer exists. When the father accidentally shoots a stranger while on a hunt, he sees himself faced with only two options. At home, Marie tends the wounds of the unconscious man. While the father distrusts the stranger, Marie is drawn to him. For her, the bunker feels not like a home but a prison from which she yearns to break free. Can this stranger be her long awaited hope? But when a group of marauders invade the bunker, Marie is not sure who her new friend really is.

Lotte Reiniger's earliest preserved fairytale film based on a fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen.

Jakob, a young policeman from a remote village, has his world unhinged when a stranger in a dress emerges from the forest and begins killing villagers with a sword.

No one takes the clumsy Max Klopstock seriously. Even the gluttonous goat makes fun of him. Max wants to prove his worth to his father and lovely Lotte. So he packs his knapsack and heads out into the world like his older brothers Emil and Joeckel did.

A king has many beautiful daughters, but the most beautiful is the youngest, princess Sophie, who likes to go to a forest nearby her father’s castle and play with her favorite toy, a golden orb. One day the young princess loses her golden orb in the water and a frog offers to retrieve it for her, but in return she must make many promises to him.

An archaeologist discovers an ancient artifact and scroll which starts a series of events that kills her several times over in various time periods, past lives and locations. It seems that the artifact and scroll are linked to a gateway to hell. Various hellish creatures pour in throughout history, it looks like the gateway has been opened. The archaeologist teams up with warriors and guides from the past to try and close the gate.

The youngest of the miller's three sons sits sadly in front of his cabin while his brothers inherit their father's mill and donkey, and all he'd gotten was an old tomcat. But what he did not know: it was a quite gifted tomcat. A tomcat that can speak and walk like a human on two legs!

A flower seller who finds the perfect plant for each of his customers based on their mood experiences a tragic death. He quickly discovers that he has access to other people's emotional worlds, but not his own. From then on he tries to grow the perfect flower that will finally touch him - and is confronted with his own transience...

Snow White's mother, the Queen, dies when she is born. Her father, the King, remarries a beautiful but vain lady. The new Queen has a magic mirror that she asks every day, who is the fairest one of all?

The adventures of an old-fashioned master cabinet maker in Munich and the tiny red-haired goblin Pumuckl, who becomes visible to him when he gets stuck to the pot of glue in his workshop. The tiny creature is visible to nobody else and full of mischief, and hilarity ensues as objects are seen moving around and the elderly craftsman seems to be talking to thin air.

A poor peasant woman lives in a cabin in the woods. She grows two rose-trees in front of her house, one with white roses and one with red. When the flowers bloomed she had two children, both girls. She named them both after the trees, Snow White and Rose Red respectively. They have an adventure involving a bad dwarf and a bewitched bear.

God, depicted as a black woman in her kitchen, creates new life and experiments: Dr. Bardot, a brain surgeon overwhelmed by chaos; Esther, mourning her husband; and Lucia, a young girl seeking revenge. Her hands place them in a city, where a solar eclipse transports them to a tropical island. There, Santeria guardian angels guide them to a house by the ocean, where they are prepared for a healing ritual by black albinos, dwarfs, and nuns. The ritual, led by a Babalao, involves sacrifices. God observes the experiment from her kitchen window.

A German stop-motion adaptation of Sleeping Beauty.

Laila is a vampire and seduces rich men into bed.

Driven by need and a thirst for knowledge, Krabat wanders through the impoverished country and falls under the control of the "black miller". Krabat defends himself against him, but his opponent still has the stronger means of power.

A beautiful princess is betrothed to the prince of a neighboring kingdom, and when the time comes, she sets out with a small entourage to wed him. She is given a magic handkerchief by her mother, which she is told will protect her, along with a talking horse. Before she departs, her mother entrusts her to the care of her chambermaid, who promises to look after her. Unknown to the queen, however is the fact that the chambermaid desires the prince for herself, and has been concocting an evil plan to accomplish her ends. With the reluctant help of two bumbling servants, the chambermaid deprives the princess of the magic handkerchief, and tricks her into changing places with her, swearing her to secrecy. Once they arrive at the palace, the maid is taken for the princess, who becomes a goose girl.

Deep in a forest in Upper Bavaria, 12-year-old Lisa stumbles upon something that shouldn't really exist: a wolpertinger! The fluffy mythical creature not only has a penchant for causing involuntary chaos—it also possesses miraculous healing powers. Lisa hopes to use its blood to save her mother, who is in the hospital after an accident. Together with her friends, she sets off for the city and embarks on the wildest adventure of her life...

Because Dummling has a good heart, fate leads him to a princess waiting for rescue.

In the 1930s, within a prison cell somewhere in Europe, young inmate P. spends his days reading about murderers in newspapers while eagerly awaiting the night. When night falls, a magical transformation occurs, setting the stage for a unique exploration of love, queerness, obsession, and unexpected sources of strength.

When a demon gets summoned late at night, he finds himself faced with an unsolvable equation

Lilith's biggest sexual fantasy is to turn into a monster and devour her sex partner. Her one night stand Leopold is not very sympathetic towards this idea, so she needs to take the matters into her own hands to fulfill her fantasies. So she decides to buy a hundredweight of minced meat and build herself a mince prince. But how to bring him to life?

In a darkened room, a flickering television goes black and familiar spaces begin to overlap, revealing the quiet unraveling of human connection across diverging realities.

A wicked witch locked Rapunzel in a tall tower without doors. Whenever she wanted to enter, the witch would call, "Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair", and Rapunzel would lower her extremely long hair for the witch to climb. Years pass until one day a prince, riding through the forest, heard her beautiful singing and was captivated.

Sam wakes up, gets ready and goes to do his daily job. And then the unexpected happens. A bomb explodes in the center of the shopping mall where he works. He drags himself towards the entrance to save the victims. One by one he pulls them out, until something terrible takes place. In complete hysteria he runs off till he falls down from exhaustion. A woman's voice makes him raise his head. She's one of the victims he saved. She wants to know why the suicide bomber did it. This encounter projects him back in history and even in a surreal world. Thereafter he runs into everyone he saved and feels that their defeat shows many parallels with his own. Even his confrontation with the wrongdoer isn't that straightforward as he thought it would be and confronts him with the fact that guilt and innocence can be pretty much alike.

Orphan August can hardly believe his eyes. In the dead of winter, a small bird suddenly lands at his window. But the strange creature is a tree elf - the last of its kind, who entrusts August with an almost impossible mission that could change his own and the world of tree alves forever.

Austria-Hungary 1813: Two soldiers returning from the Napoleonic war encounter a creeping invasion in a remote mountain village that far exceeds their imagination - especially as the powerful enemy calls for actions that put the humanity of the two men to the test.

One day, Maria meets a prince who gives her a magic stone but then her stepsister steals it and throws it down a well. While trying to retrieve the stone, Maria falls in and awakens in a magical realm.

Tammi is annoyed. Instead of traveling to Formentera and presenting her followers with dreamy photos, her mother Simone takes her to the middle of nowhere to attend the funeral of her grandfather Jackel, a complete stranger. There she also met her aunt Britta and her children. There isn't even cell phone reception in the boring amusement park, and Tammi has little or nothing to do with her cousin Umbo and Cousin Cookie. But suddenly something incredible happens: During a thunderstorm, three worn-out ghost train characters come to life - the witch, the giant and Rumpelstiltskin. Tammi recognizes them as perfect allies to wreak havoc and finally escape this boring wasteland. But unfortunately she did the math without her own family and the stubbornness of the spirits. Suddenly everyone has claimed the amusement park for themselves and a wild chaos ensues.

Hannah and Fanny's father once callously abandoned his family, which is why Hannah, at least, has little desire to rush to the funeral after their mother Martha announces the old man's death on an island in the south. But pregnant Fanny is determined to pay her last respects, and Hannah allows herself to be persuaded. She quickly regrets this, because for some reason (which could well have something to do with her father), the dead rise from their graves on the island and harass the living.

An Indian mystic uses his power of invisibility to scare a young inventor.