Lotte Reininger

Lotte Reininger
Image: Deutsches Film Museum, Frankfurt

Born in Berlin in 1899, Lotte Reininger pioneered new forms of paper animation in the 1920's. Inspired by shadow puppetry, Reininger developed highly articulated paper puppets to be animated through stop motion camera work. When creating her paper characters she "had an astonishing facility with cutting--holding the scissors still in her right hand, and manipulating the paper at lightning speed with her left hand so that the cut always went in the right direction", writes William Moritz (Professor of film and animation history, California Institute of the Arts), "If a figure needed to make some complex or supple movement, it would have to be built from 25 or 50 separate pieces, then joined together with fine lead wire". In her early black and white work she used multiple planes of glass and various tones of tissue papers to create variegated landscapes and complex paper spaces.


Lotte Reininger, Die Geschictie des Prinzen Acmed (The Adventures of Prince Achmed), 1925

Lotte Reininger is perhaps best known for her feature length animated film Die Geschictie des Prinzen Acmed (The Adventures of Prince Achmed) which she made in 1925. Her first film Das Ornament des verliebten Herzens (The Ornament of the Enamoured Heart), shot in 1919, was the story of two lovers and an ornament that reflected their changing moods. In both projects ( as well as the 20 plus films Reininger completed in her lifetime), she combines her sophisticated animations with well known fairy tale and opera plots in paper-cut comedy, romance and eerie magic.