The organisers of the 16th Stuttgart Festival of Animated Film have included the bizarre stop-motion cinema fairytale “Coraline” in the programme for AniMovie, the competition for feature-length films. Cult director Henry Selick’s most recent film will celebrate its German premiere when it is shown this Saturday in the 3D version. This Universal film is not due to open in German cinemas until July 30.

The feature-length animated film "Coraline" is based on the children’s book of the same name written by the British fantasy and comic author Neil Gaiman ("Stardust", "Anansi Boys"). His book, published by Harper Collins in 2002 (German translation from Heyne Verlag), is about Coraline, a girl who discovers a way through a walled-up door into a nightmare parallel world. There she meets her "Other Mother", a friendly creature with shiny buttons instead of eyes, who wants to sew nice new button eyes on Coraline too…

The American animated artist Henry Selick is responsible for this cinema adaptation. He was also successful with the Christmas fairytale "Nightmare Before Christmas" (1994, also available in 3D) which was coproduced by Tim Burton, the director of "Batman", "James and the Giant Peach" (1996) and the fantasy comedy "Monkeybone" (2001). "Coraline‘s" official German premiere is on Saturday, May 9 at 9.00 pm in Stuttgart’s Metropol 2 cinema. It will be repeated on Sunday, May 10 at 7.00 pm. Selick is expected to visit the Festival and for this special occasion will be bringing the original "Coraline" puppets to be exhibited in the cinema’s foyer.

The distributor, Universal Pictures International Germany will present "Coraline" in 3D. In theatre 2 at the Metropol which is one of the "inner city cinemas" managed by EM-Filmtheaterbetrieben Mertz, three dimensional images can be projected thanks to highly modern projection equipment (Christie CP 2000 projectors plus Doremi server). To do this the Mertz company uses the 3D technology produced by the US supplier XpanD, which in conjunction with digital projectors and special glasses achieves visually superlative cinema entertainment.