Lotte Reinger (1899 – 1981) was a German film maker who made over sixty films using cut-out animation and made "The Adventures of Prince Achmed" ("Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed"), which is considered to be one of the first full length feature films as well as the oldest surviving animated film.
Her work used black silhouettes placed on coloured glass which were photographed and shown together in a sequence. The silhouettes were hand cut by Reinger herself. She was the one of the first to use this technique and is considered to be a pioneer of animation (and cut-out animation) because hers was the first use of this technique.
Lotte's main inspiration for her work came from East Asian shadow puppetry, which she showed interest in as a child performing puppet shows in a homemade shadow theatre. Her animations were almost always based on fairytales. She admired the work of director Paul Wegener, which inspired her to take up acting under the teaching of Max Rheinhardt, an actor and director, at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin. There she created silhouettes for some of Wegener's films. She also met other artists who were setting up an experimental animation studio, Institut für Kulturforschung (Institute for Cultural Research), and invited Reiniger to join them. She created short animations before working on "The Adventures of Prince Achmed" (which was based on stories from 1001 Nights) over a course of three years (1923-1926). Afterwards her work consisted mostly of animated shorts.
Nowadays her name is not well known, the credit of the first animated feature unfairly going to Walt Disney's "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" produced a good ten years afterwards in 1937. However her work was the main asethetic inspiration for the animated sequence in "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1" entitled "The Tale of the Three Brothers".
Her work used black silhouettes placed on coloured glass which were photographed and shown together in a sequence. The silhouettes were hand cut by Reinger herself. She was the one of the first to use this technique and is considered to be a pioneer of animation (and cut-out animation) because hers was the first use of this technique.
Lotte's main inspiration for her work came from East Asian shadow puppetry, which she showed interest in as a child performing puppet shows in a homemade shadow theatre. Her animations were almost always based on fairytales. She admired the work of director Paul Wegener, which inspired her to take up acting under the teaching of Max Rheinhardt, an actor and director, at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin. There she created silhouettes for some of Wegener's films. She also met other artists who were setting up an experimental animation studio, Institut für Kulturforschung (Institute for Cultural Research), and invited Reiniger to join them. She created short animations before working on "The Adventures of Prince Achmed" (which was based on stories from 1001 Nights) over a course of three years (1923-1926). Afterwards her work consisted mostly of animated shorts.
Nowadays her name is not well known, the credit of the first animated feature unfairly going to Walt Disney's "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" produced a good ten years afterwards in 1937. However her work was the main asethetic inspiration for the animated sequence in "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1" entitled "The Tale of the Three Brothers".