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Animators

Lotte Reiniger (1899-1981)

From her very first film, the German animator devoted her life to making exquisite silhouette films based on fables and fairytales. Her involvement with animation began in 1919. She was already an accomplished creator of cut-out silhouette pictures and used this talent at acting school to impress her hero, the actor Paul Wegener. Reiniger produced the captions for Wegener's 1918 film The Pied Piper of Hamelin. In 1919, Wegener introduced her to a group who were setting up an experimental animation studio. Amongst them was Carl Koch, her future husband and working partner, and the animator Bertold Bartosch, whom she at first assisted.

In 1923, Reiniger started work on The Adventures of Prince Achmed, the first European animated feature film. She worked closely with Bartosch and the director Walter Ruttmann on this. An adaptation of The Thousand and One Nights, the 90-minute film was made entirely with back-lit paper cut-outs, arranged in different layers to provide a three-dimensional look. Ruttmann created the backgrounds and Reiniger cut out the silhouette figures. She was immensely skilled at this - holding her scissors in her right hand, she moved the paper so that she always cut in the right direction. Some of her articulated figures consisted of up to 50 pieces held together with thin wire.

The Adventures of Prince Achmed was completed in 1926 and was shown with original music by Wolfgang Zeller. It proved very successful and was much admired by directors such as René Clair and Jean Renoir, who later commissioned Reiniger to create a shadow puppet sequence in his 1937 film Le Marseillaise. Reiniger made another feature film, Dr Dolittle and his Animals (1928), which had music by Kurt Weill and Paul Hindemith.

When Hitler came to power, Reiniger and her husband tried to find a home outside Germany, working in Britain (for the GPO Film Unit), France and Italy. However were not able finally to settle in Britain until 1949. Here, she made commercials for the Post Office and concentrated on producing films based on fables and fairy stories for her own company, Primrose Films. She began using colour backgrounds in Jack and the Beanstalk (1955) and coloured figures in Helen La Belle (1957) and The Seraglio(1958). These films were made for British television. Reiniger loved making films for children 'because they are a very critical and thankful public.'

Carl Koch died in 1962. Lotte Reiniger continued working well into her seventies, making Aucassin and Nicolette for the National Film Board of Canada in 1975, and teaching younger animators. Her work is astonishingly fluid and atmospheric considering that facial expressions are not possible with silhouettes. Reiniger's style is so distinctive that few animators have followed in her footsteps. The French animator Michel Ocelet uses cut-outs, which are front-lit, and has occasionally ventured into silhouette animation with films such as his 1989 television fairytale series, Cine Si.