Reiniger’s choice of career, and her signature style, was therefore assured. You could also say that her story is also a cautionary one – she worked around the limitations of being a woman in the film industry, rather than storming in to claim her place in the studio. The father of one of her students, a man called Louis Hagen, had invested in film stock during the shaky years of Weimar hyperinflation, and gave the young artist the reels, encouraging her to try her hand at the broader canvas of a feature film. But Reiniger’s films are so often, if you will excuse the pun, a cut above. “Animated Women.” Filmmakers Newsletter(Summer 1974): 40-42. Her hypnotic films, painstakingly crafted out of snippets of card and wire and animated by hand, have influenced generations of film-makers and artists. Love and gender - a lesson from ancient Greece? The animation genius you've (probably) never heard of, The women who changed the way we see the universe. “You take your best dining table, cut a hole into it, put a glass plate over it, and over the glass plate some transparent paper …”. It was in Britain that Reiniger’s career flourished again. Meet the unsung heroine of early animation. © 2020 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. As a young woman and keen to work with Wegener, she found a job designing silhouettes for the intertitles in his films. “The projection was a triumph,” Reiniger remembered.

But what about Lotte Reiniger? The crispness and intricacy of her black, scissored figures, combine with fluid, bouncing animation. She was also an enthusiast for the Chinese art of shadow puppetry, creating her own silhouette spectaculars for a parental audience. Her best known films are The Adventures of Prince Achmed, from 1926—thought to be one of the oldest surviving feature-length animated films—and Papageno (1935). The films, and their enduring charms, are phenomenal, but there are contradictions in the Reiniger story. Today’s Google doodle commemorating Reiniger’s work shows her inside one of her films, moving from her desk through a succession of fairytale scenarios. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994. … While we think of Reiniger as a trail-blazer, her work was mostly inspired by antiquated traditions of performance and storytelling. We’ve all heard of Walt Disney. There another important aspect of her career was settled. Reiniger decribed herself as a “primitive caveman artist”, but her work is anything but simple. Bendazzi, Giannalberto. Anyone who has seen Prince Achmed wouldn't be convinced by this reasoning, but, alas, only a tiny fraction of the people who see Snow White ever get to see any Reiniger film at all. Reiniger made a dozen films for Primrose, which reinvigorated her career for another decade. All rights reserved. As soon as you think that you have spotted a join, or seen the technique behind the movement, the scene changes, another transformation occurs and the picture has been reformed again. Coté, Guy. To play this video you need to enable JavaScript. Lotte Reiniger, a pioneer in the world of animated film, and a standard-bearer for women in the industry, was born 117 years ago today in Berlin. First published on Thu 2 Jun 2016 04.07 EDT. ------. She collaborated with artists including her husband Richter, Jean Renoir and Walter Ruttman, but the essence of her technique was work that could be completed at home, at a small desk or kitchen table. In the 1960s, Reiniger stopped working and lived quietly in London, but by the 70s her work was being revived and she toured the world talking about her career. Lotte that Silhouette Girl is a short animated documentary about the fantastic and creative life of film pioneer Lotte Reiniger, who was a rockstar of an animator.She invented the multiplane camera and created the first feature length animation, The Adventures of Prince Achmed, which is still one of the most beautiful films to ever light up the screen. Centro Internazionale per il Cinema di Animazione. Her films have a distinct style, one that was mimicked by several contemporary artists in both commercial and more refined areas (so many early German advertisements use her cut-out method), as well as those who followed her. Turin, 1982.

She also made one of the world’s first animated features, a whirlwind of a fantasy film called The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926). Lotte Reiniger, when mentioned at all, is most often brushed off in a single sentence noting that she apparently made a feature-length silhouette film in 1926, The Adventures of Prince Achmed; but since that was in Germany, and silhouettes aren't cartoons, Disney still invented the feature-length animated film with Snow White. first animation film Lotte Reiniger Papageno 1935 - YouTube Beckerman, Howard. How one woman transformed Alzheimer’s research, The woman who planted 50m trees (with a little help...), How BBC Ideas and The Open University work together, Find that perfect playlist by browsing our A-Z, Find the answers to frequently asked questions about the site, Listen to more about the life of Lotte Reiniger, Animation World Network on Lotte Reiniger. Reiniger responded with The Adventures of Prince Achmed. Omaggio a Lotte Reiniger. Lotte Reiniger is one of the most important figures in the history of animation. “Flatland Fairy Tales.” Film(October 1954): n.p. To get a clearer sense of exactly what went into these shorts (or into 1926’s The Adventures of Prince Achmed, her only feature-length film, and first fully animated feature in the history of cinema), watch the seventeen-minute documentary “The Art of Lotte Reiniger” just above. Watch this BBC video to find out about the unsung heroine of early animation.

Another peer who combined experimental art and film work, Hans Richter, said of her that while her films were based on fairytales and modelled after ancient techniques, she “belonged to the avant-garde as far as independent production and courage were concerned”. The animator as artist, surrounded by the fruit of her imagination. Lotte Reiniger developed a distinctive method of animating with cut-out paper silhouettes.

“Those rats really moved as erratically as you would expected panicky rats would and they followed the Piper all right.”. The cut-outs are often backed with jewel-like colours, so the impression is of visual richness, rather than stark monochrome. Lotte Reiniger, a pioneer in the world of animated film, and a standard-bearer for women in the industry, was born 117 years ago today in Berlin. In 1979 she made the gorgeous The Rose and the Ring, from a Thackeray story, before dying in 1981, back home in Germany. She joined an experimental animation studio, the Berliner Institut für Kulturforschung, where she met avant-gardists including Bertolt Brecht and her future husband Carl Koch. Wegener found he could not control live rats (or even guinea pigs) on set, so Reiniger was tasked with animating wooden rodents, stop-motion style. The story of the groundbreaking director behind today’s Google doodle and how her fairytale-inspired work made her one of the most important early women in the film industry, Thu 2 Jun 2016 04.33 EDT In this clip you can see Reiniger explain how to create an animation studio at home. She made the oldest surviving animated feature film, “The Adventures of Prince Achmed”, she pioneered the merging of animation and music, and developed a multi-plane camera stand over a decade before anyone in Hollywood built one. Cartoons: One Hundred Years of Cinema Animation. Charlotte "Lotte" Reiniger (2 June 1899 – 19 June 1981) was a German film director and the foremost pioneer of silhouette animation.

Her first step into animation proper was on his film The Pied Piper of Hamelin (1918). Few of her nearly 70 films are readily available--and almost none of them in excellent prints; when Reiniger fled Germany to England in the 1930s, she was not able to bring her original negatives with her, so most modern prints are copies of copies, which have lost much of the fine detail, especially in backgrounds. Reiniger may have continued making shorts, if she hadn’t had a windfall. Reiniger did not work like a film-maker, but as an artist.

We’ve all heard of Walt Disney.

Read about our approach to external linking. But what about Lotte Reiniger?

Available for everyone, funded by readers. “The Films of Lotte Reiniger.” Film Culture9 (1956): 20. Film was Reiniger’s passion: as a child she was delighted by the trick films of Georges Méliès, and later the dreamy horrors of Paul Wegener. In the following years, Reiniger made six beautiful short films. House, techno, grime: Did they start with these women? A selection of amazing women who didn't really get the attention they deserved. During the 1930s, Reiniger and her husband fled Germany (“I didn’t like this whole Hitler thing,” she said) but unable to secure a visa in any one country, they moved from place to place until they settled in London after war. Reiniger is also noted for having devised the first form of a multiplane camera; she made more than 40 films, all using her invention. She initially made films for the GPO Film Unit but in 1953 Hagen’s son, also called Louis, who had come to the UK as a refugee after being interned in a concentration camp, founded a studio called Primrose Productions. By conjuring fantastic worlds out of paper and light, Reiniger’s films reach us on a deeply emotional level too: we seem to see imagination at work, as when a story is improvised or embellished from memory at a bedside.