No German author of children's and young adult books is more successful than Cornelia Funke, and that worldwide. Young readers enthusiastically immerse themselves in her stories, novels and series, follow her into fantastic parallel worlds, but feel no less at home in her lovingly and sensitively told everyday stories about friendship, first love and other early life experiences. When the ‘Wild Chickens’ first came to the cinema in early 2006, adventurous yet realistic stories for girls were still a rarity. Cornelia Funke's book series came at just the right time: amusing, eventful and ‘tangible’ stories about Sprotte, Melanie, Trude, Frieda and Wilma, their friendship and solidarity, their problems with parents or single mothers, their endeavours and struggles for a ‘better world’, as the friends imagine it and fight for it. It was also about their crushes, preferences and love affairs with boys, especially from the rival clique of the ‘pygmies’. The girls develop in appearance alone over the course of the three films and smoothly make the transition from ‘soft’ children to body-conscious teenagers. By the end, they have even had offspring in the form of the ‘wild chicks’, while they themselves, still slightly bumpy and sometimes overwhelmed, ‘start out in life’.