Lotte Reiniger

• Born in Germany in 1899.
• Became interested in cutting out silhouettes as a child, and performed shadow theatres for her classmates.
• As a teenager, Reiniger studied at the Max Reinhardt Theatre School – got the attention of her professors by making silhouettes of them.
• Early work involved making intertitles and (initially static) silhouettes for films. This led to her being offered a position at the Institut für Kulturforschung (Institute for Cultural Research). (See Bastiancich, 1992, p. 5).

The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926)

• The offer to produce an animated feature was made by a banker who visited the Institute.
• Reiniger adapted elements of the collected stories 1001 Arabian Nights. The film is presented as a number of ‘acts’, meaning that the narrative has a slightly disjointed structure. However, it was always intended to be screened in full.
• The film took three years of work with a small team (including Lotte Reiniger’s husband Carl Koch, and the avant-garde artist Walter Ruttman).
• First Musical score composed for a specific animation
• The Adventures of Prince Achmed is the first animated feature known to survive.
  Reiniger’s film is important not just because of its possible status as a ‘first’.
  Reiniger is an early example of a woman being given significant creative control over film projects. It took the majority of Hollywood studios several more decades to allow similar freedoms.
• For many years, female employees at the Disney studio were ‘almost exclusively [put to work] in the Ink and Paint department (colouring the animation cels)’ (Griffin, 2000, p. 26
• Reiniger developed a style of silhouette animation that she continued to refine throughout her life.
• The film offers an alternative to the dominant cel animation system of the period.
• Reiniger and her team experimented with various effects in conjunction with the silhouette technique.
• Certain backgrounds created using combinations of glass, oil, sand, and multi-layered tissue paper

Silhouettes

• Reiniger’s ‘trick table’th camera shots from the front with back lighting
  Silhouette puppetry dates back many centuries:
• Artwork survives from as early as 600BC (Rutherford, 2009, p. 13).
  Reiniger’s animation is shot from above, whereas shadow theatres have historically been shot using frontal lighting (Bastiancich, 1992, p. 9).
• Figures built with joints, giving flexibility to the animation and connecting the various parts of the body.
• A more detailed version of the figure would sometimes be created for close-up shots, to give extra detail.
• Some shots involved multiple cutouts, such as the transformation sequences.

Process

• Reiniger would generally storyboard the scenes and draw the protagonists in detail before ‘reducing’ the image to a silhouette.
• A notable challenge of silhouette animation is being able to convey information without relying on many of the elements we often take for granted – colour, facial expression, costume design, and so on.
• The documentary Lotte Reiniger: Homage to the Inventor of the Silhouette Film (below) shows this technique by comparing production drawings for Reiniger’s Cinderella (1954) with the finished film.

Silhouette Precedents

• Reiniger was not the first to create cinematic silhouette animation, although she is notable for committing to it as an ongoing technique.
• Segundo de Chomón (who also directed The Electric Hotel [1908]) experimented with silhouette animation in several films, including Une Excursion Incohérente (1909), where it was blended with live-action footage (including some live-action shadow play)
• J R Bray the silhouette fantasies

Silhouette Fantasies

• Despite having already developed the cel animation system, the Bray studio (in conjunction with the artist C. Allan Gilbert) experimented with silhouette animation with the series Silhouette Fantasies in 1916.
• At least six films were produced.
• At least some were based around series subjects, such as ‘Greek myths and tragedies’.

Quirino Cristiani – The First Animated Feature Filmmaker?

• It is believed that animator Quirino Cristiani produced at least two feature-length animated films that preceded Reiniger’s work.
• El Apóstol (The Apostle, 1917) was a satire featuring a caricuature of the then-President Hipólito Yrigoyen.- none exist today
• Sin dejar rastros (Without a Trace, 1918) was based around the real-life sinking of an Argentine ship by a German commander. The film was confiscated upon its release.
• Cristiani made his films for a local audience. There was very little export appeal and so few (if any) copies were made.
• Cristiani’s personal copies were destroyed in a fire (and Without a Trace was confiscated).
• It is not known whether the films definitively featured animation all the way through – the only evidence is oral testimony from Cristiani (see Bendazzi, 1994, p. 50).

Michel Ocelot

• Ocelot has occasionally criticized some of Reiniger’s works – calling them, for example, ‘rather archaic and not very attractive’ (in the DVD interview ‘Comment on Fait’) – but his techniques and style have many references to her work. Also like Reiniger, many of Ocelot’s stories refer to myth and legend.

Les Trois Inventeurs (1979)

• Ocelot’s first independent production, produced in relative isolation over the course of a year.
• Uses a series of cutout puppets.
• A reaction in part to an unhappy experience working on a television production – his first professional role as director – where his fellow animators had claimed that ‘cut-out animation was for amateurs’. Ocelot aimed to use the film to place himself in ‘artistic tradition that made craftsmanship one of its main traits’ (Buono, 2024, p. 25, 18).
• Unlike his later silhouette work, Les Trois Inventeurs uses white paper models. The paper is often twisted and embossed to purposely draw attention to the cutout aesthetic.
• The film’s ending also draws attention to the ‘material’ nature of the protagonists and their world.
• The film was a significant critical success and established Ocelot as a viable independent animator (Buono, 2024, pp. 29-30).