Lotte Reiniger facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Lotte Reiniger
Reiniger in 1939
Born	Charlotte Reiniger (1899-06-02)2 June 1899 Berlin-Charlottenburg, German Empire
Died	19 June 1981(1981-06-19) (aged 82) Dettenhausen, West Germany
Occupation	Silhouette animator, film director
Years active	1918–1979
Notable work	The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926)
Spouse(s)	Carl Koch

Lotte Reiniger (born June 2, 1899 – died June 19, 1981) was a German film director and a true pioneer of silhouette animation. She was amazing at making movies using paper cut-outs!

Her most famous films include The Adventures of Prince Achmed from 1926. This movie is believed to be one of the oldest full-length animated films still existing today. Another well-known film is Papageno (1935). Lotte Reiniger also invented an early version of the multiplane camera. This special camera helped create a feeling of depth in her animations. She made over 40 films, all using her clever invention.

Biography: Lotte Reiniger's Life Story

Early Life: A Creative Beginning

Lotte Reiniger was born in Berlin, Germany, on June 2, 1899. From a young age, she loved the Chinese art of paper cutting and making silhouette puppets. She even built her own puppet theater! There, she put on shows for her family and friends.

As a teenager, Lotte fell in love with movies. She especially liked the special effects in films by Georges Méliès. She also admired the actor and director Paul Wegener, known for his film The Golem. In 1915, she went to a talk by Wegener where he spoke about the exciting possibilities of animation.

Lotte convinced her parents to let her join Wegener's acting group, the Theatre of Max Reinhardt. She started by making costumes and props backstage. Soon, she was creating silhouette portraits of the actors. She even made detailed title cards for Wegener's films, which often featured her unique silhouettes.

Adulthood and Success: Making Movies

In 1918, Lotte Reiniger animated wooden rats for Wegener's film Der Rattenfänger von Hameln (The Pied Piper of Hamelin). Her work was so good that she was invited to join the Institute for Cultural Research. This was a special studio for experimental animation and short films. Here, she met her future husband and creative partner, Carl Koch. They married in 1921. She also met other talented artists like Bertolt Brecht.

Lotte's first film as a director was Das Ornament des verliebten Herzens (The Ornament of the Enamoured Heart, 1919). This five-minute film showed two lovers and an ornament that changed with their feelings. The film was very popular and helped Lotte connect with many people in the animation world.

Over the next few years, she made six short films. Her husband, Carl Koch, produced and filmed them. One of these was the fairytale animation Aschenputtel (Cinderella, 1922). She also made advertising films and special effects for other movies. A famous example is a silhouette falcon for a dream scene in Die Nibelungen by Fritz Lang. During this time, Lotte was at the center of a group of ambitious German animators.

In 1923, a man named Louis Hagen asked her to make a full-length animated film. This was a huge challenge! Animated films back then were usually short and meant to be funny. No one had tried to make a long animated movie before. Lotte said, "We had to think twice. This was a never heard of thing."

The result was The Adventures of Prince Achmed, finished in 1926. This film was one of the very first animated feature films. Its story was a mix of tales from One Thousand and One Nights. It took almost a year to find someone to distribute the film. But once it premiered in Paris, it became a big hit with critics and audiences. Today, The Adventures of Prince Achmed is thought to be one of the oldest, if not the oldest, full-length animated films still around. It's also seen as the first long avant-garde animated film.

Lotte Reiniger also created an early version of the multiplane camera for her film. This was a decade before Ub Iwerks and Walt Disney used similar ideas. She placed different layers of glass with cut-outs on them. A camera above would film them, and light from below would make the silhouettes stand out. This created a cool layered effect. Lotte even wrote instructions on how to build her "trick-table" in her book.

After Prince Achmed was a success, Lotte made another feature film. Doktor Dolittle und seine Tiere (Doctor Dolittle and his Animals, 1928) was based on the popular children's books. This film tells the story of Doctor Dolittle's trip to Africa to help sick animals.

In 1929, Lotte co-directed her first live-action film, Die Jagd nach dem Glück (The Pursuit of Happiness). It was about a shadow-puppet group and even included a 20-minute silhouette performance by Lotte.

Flight from Germany and Later Life: A New Chapter

When the Nazi Party came to power in Germany, Lotte Reiniger and Carl Koch decided to leave. They were involved in politics that the Nazis didn't like. However, it was hard to find a country that would give them permanent visas. So, from 1933 to 1944, they moved from country to country, staying as long as their visas allowed.

During this time, they made 12 films. Two of the most famous are Carmen (1933) and Papageno (1935). Both were based on famous operas. When World War II began, they stayed in Rome until 1944. Then they returned to Berlin to care for Lotte's sick mother. During this difficult time, Lotte was forced to make some propaganda films for Germany. This meant she had to work under strict rules, which sometimes limited her creativity.

In 1949, Lotte and Carl moved to London. There, Lotte made short advertising films. In the early 1950s, she became friends with Freddy Bloom, who asked her to design a logo for the National Deaf Children's Society. Lotte quickly cut out silhouettes of four children running up a hill. One of these was used as a magazine cover design for many years!

In 1953, Lotte and Louis Hagen Jr. (the son of the man who funded Prince Achmed) started a company called Primrose Productions. Over the next two years, they made more than a dozen short silhouette films based on Grimms' Fairy Tales for the BBC and American TV. Lotte also drew pictures for the 1953 book King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table.

After her husband passed away in 1963, Lotte took a break. But people became interested in her work again, and she returned to Germany. She also visited the United States and started making films once more. She made three more films, with her last one, Die vier Jahreszeiten (The Four Seasons), finished the year before she died.

Lotte Reiniger received important awards for her work. She died in Dettenhausen, Germany, on June 19, 1981, shortly after her 82nd birthday.

Art Style: Lotte's Unique Look

Lotte Reiniger had a very special art style in her animations. It was different from other artists in the 1920s and 1930s. Back then, characters often showed feelings with their faces. But Lotte's characters used their body movements and gestures to show emotions and actions.

She also often used a technique called metamorphosis, where things would magically transform. This focus on change was perfect for the fairytale stories she loved to tell. In The Adventures of Prince Achmed, she used animation to show amazing things that couldn't be seen in real life. Lotte believed that animation's ability to ignore real-world rules was one of its greatest strengths.

Because of this, Lotte's characters weren't always perfectly realistic. But they moved in a smooth, flowing way that was very important to her artistic style. Even though other animators used similar ideas, Lotte stood out because she achieved this unique style using cutout animation. Her figures moved in a way that reminds you of stop-motion animation.

Influence: How Lotte Inspired Others

Lotte Reiniger's black silhouettes became a popular look in films and art. Many animators who made fairytale movies after her were influenced by her work.

Even Walt Disney used ideas from Lotte Reiniger. His film Fantasia uses a style similar to Lotte's in one scene. Also, the movie The Princess and the Frog has a musical number that uses her silhouette style.

Disney also used a multiplane camera in movies like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. This was based on the camera technology that Lotte Reiniger first developed.

French animator Michel Ocelot uses many of Lotte's techniques in his silhouette films, like Princes et princesses.

The movie Bram Stoker's Dracula even included a short silhouette scene as a tribute to early cinema techniques like Lotte's.

The animated TV show South Park uses a paper cut-out style that reminds people of Reiniger's work.

Lotte Reiniger's cut-out animation style was also used in the opening credits of the 2004 film Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events.

In the 2010 film Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1, animator Ben Hibon used Lotte's style for the short film "The Tale of the Three Brothers."

The animated TV series Steven Universe also paid tribute to Lotte's film style in the episode "The Answer."

Legacy: Remembering Lotte Reiniger

The municipal museum in Tübingen, Germany, has many of Lotte Reiniger's original materials. It also has a permanent exhibit called "The World in Light and Shadow: Silhouette, shadow theatre, silhouette film." The Filmmuseum Düsseldorf also has many items from Lotte Reiniger's work, including her animation table.

On June 2, 2016, Google celebrated Lotte Reiniger's 117th birthday with a special Google Doodle about her.

Filmography: Lotte Reiniger's Movies

See also

In Spanish: Lotte Reiniger para niños