Artist Research - Lotte Reiniger

Charlotte "Lotte" Reiniger, born 2nd June 1899, was a German animator and pioneer of silhoutte animation, a style born from her fascination with Chinese paper cutting at a young age. Reiniger took great inspiration from the works of Georges Méliés and Paul Wegener to the point where she would attend a lecture by Wegener at the age of 16 and enrolled in the former acting group of Wegener, working backstage on props and costume, eventually leading her to returning to sillouettes as she made portraits of the actors in her spare time.

Unlike most art of the 1920s, which used expression to portray emotion, Reiniger took her silhouette style to heart, creating characters that used intricate movements to express themselves. One of Reiniger's most famous works and one of the oldest surviving full-length animated films, The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926), displays one of the defining traits of her work, her tenency to work on fairy tale adapations. From her first film in 1919 (The Ornament of the Lovestruck Heart) to her last in 1980 (The Four Seasons), Reiniger has worked on over 45 films including over 20 fairy tale adapations.

Reiniger is also known for the invention of the first Multiplane Camera (or at least a precursor to it), a animating device used to capture an illusion of depth through multiple layers of animation moving a la a parallax. More sophisticated Multiplane Cameras would later be used in many Fleischer cartoons and Walt Disney animated films.

Today Reiniger's work is still remembered, being referenced in many works from Disney's Fantasia (1940) to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 1 (2010), and to say Reiniger has been forgotten in the four decades since her death would be false. Even now Reiniger is known for her unique style and expressive character animations, as a pioneer of silhouette animation and as a driving force in the first half of the century for the animation industry.