WHO IS LOTTE REINIGER? The Pioneering Animator
She brought together Chinese art, film, stop-frame animation and, European fairy stories and folk myths, and created a sensation that knows no parallel. She is totally unique.
Lotte Reiniger , the German-born film-maker, brought a European slant to the age-old Chinese art of silhouette puppetry. She fell in love with silhouette puppet animation and it was the love affair that lasted her entire life. Next to her co-producer husband, Carl Koch, it was the love of her life. It was while she was a teenager in school that she started experimenting with shadow puppet shows. She began with scenes from Shakespeare, evolved into animating Fairy Tales. She brought together Chinese art, film, stop-frame animation and, European fairy stories and folk myths, and created a sensation that knows no parallel. She is totally unique.
As a little girl she wanted to be an actress, she even studied with Max Rheinhardt at the Deutsches Theater Berlin. After then being exposed to Chinese shadow puppets she took her dramatic skills and applied then to animator – going on to produce more than 60 animated films from 1919 to 1980, of which, sadly, only about 40 survive.
In our video , we present one of her earliest productions, Cinderella , which has been described by Dan North (Spectacular Attractions) as “evocative and engrossing.” Because it was a silent film, I have added music by Kevin MacLeod to accentuate the story with a dramatic flare. “Nobody else has defined a form of animation as authoritatively as she did,” Dan North continued, “and the opening section, where scissors make the first cuts into the main character, conjuring her out of simple raw materials, displays the means by which the story is fabricated and marks it out as a product of her labor.”
We also present her 1922 “The Star of Bethlehem” in its revamped 1956 color version. We have replaced the Cathedral Films cheesy music and narration with the finest tradition Christman music to better showcase each scene. This demonstrates the timeless nature of Reiniger’s artistry. What worked in 1922 was still valued in 1956, and with our soundtrack update, still works in 2018, nearly a century later.
Her only feature-length work is The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926), which three years to complete, is often credited as being cinema’s first full-length animation. This precedes Disney’s Snow White (1937) by over a decade. For this feature, she developed the multiplane camera which was later developed for Walt Disney by animator and special effects technician Ub Iwerk , the original designer of Mickey Mouse.
Reiniger left Germany after Hitler took power, later saying: “I didn't like this whole Hitler thing and because I had many Jewish friends whom I was no longer allowed to call friends".
She and her husband eventually settled in England taking British citizenship and founded Primrose Productions , through which they produced a number of films for the BBC, among others. They were a dynamic production team.
Following the death of her husband in 1963 took a decade-long creative hiatus, and then she produced her last two works, Aucassin, and Nicolette in 1975 and The Rose and the Ring in 1979.
She died in Dettenhausen , Germany on June 19, 1981, at the age of 82.
Filmmaker Hans Richter, a close friend of Reiniger’s, said: "she belonged to the avant-garde as far as independent production and courage were concerned." And, the British Film Institute’s Philip Kemp said : “No one else has taken a specific animation technique and made it so utterly her own. To date, she has no rivals, and for all practical purposes the history of silhouette animation begins and ends with Reiniger."
LOTTE'S FILMS
1980 The Four Seasons
1979 The Rose and the Ring
1975 Aucassin and Nicolette
1974 The Lost Son
1961 The Frog Prince
1958 A Night in a Harem
1957 Helen la belle
1957 The Magic Horse
1957 The Gallant Little Tailor
1956 Jack and the Beanstalk
1956 The Star of Bethlehem
1955 The Little Chimney Sweep
1954 Aladdin and the Magic Lamp
1954 Caliph Storch
1954 Cinderella
1954 Däumlienchen
1954 Hänsel and Gretel
1954 Puss in Boots
1954 Snow White and Rose Red
1954 The Frog Prince
1954 The Grasshopper and the Ant
1954 The Sleeping Beauty
1954 The Three Wishes
1951 Mary's Birthday
1950 The Dancing Fleece
1950 Not Without Licence
1949 Here and There
1944 The Goose That Lays the Golden Eggs
1938 The HPO
1937 Daughter
1937 The King's Breakfast
1937 The Tocher
1936 Silhouetten
1935 Der Graf von Carabas
1935 Galathea: Das lebende Marmorbild
1935 Kalif Storch
1935 Papageno
1935 The Little Chimney Sweep
1934 Das gestohlene Herz
1933 Carmen
1933 Das rollende Rad
1932 Sissi
1931 Harlekin
1930 Zehn Minuten Mozart
1928 Der scheintote Chinese
1928 Dr. Dolittle and His Animals
1928 Grotesken im Schnee
1927 The Chinese Nightingale
1926 The Adventures of Prince Achmed
1924 Die Barcarole
1922 Cinderella
1922 Sleeping Beauty
1922 The Flying Koffer
1922 The Secret of the Marquise
1920 Amor und das standhafte Liebespaar
1919 The Ornament of the Lovestruck Heart