My Favorite Lotte Reiniger Film

The oldest surviving feature-length animated film is Lotte Reiniger's "The Adventures of Prince Achmed," technically the third ever created after Quirino Cristiani's films from the 1910s.  Instead of cel animation, Reiniger created a form of silhouette animation using backlit cutouts, filmed with stop-motion techniques one frame at a time.  This created distinctive black silhouette characters, similar to the ones used in Chinese shadow puppetry.  This style of animation is still seen today - examples include the films of Michel Ocelot, and segments of the recent "Candyman" sequel/reboot - but all of them feel like homages to Reiniger, who utterly dominated this particular form of animation for half a century.      

Reiniger's work is so visually distinctive that it's instantly recognizable.  The cutouts consist of bold black shapes and lines, forming fanciful characters and enchanting worlds against a monochromatic background.  The movements are very limited, but graceful.  The puppets are largely static, with faces that never change, yet are still wonderfully expressive.  "Achmed" was conceived of as a "One Thousand and One Nights" pastiche, combining various elements of "Aladdin," "Sinbad the Sailor," and other stories.  Prince Achmed is an original character, but he and the princess, the sorcerer, the witch, and the other characters all feel familiar.  So does the hero quest, the romance of the young lovers, and the triumph of good over evil.  Nearly all of Reiniger's films were based on fairy tales of one kind or another, full of magical creatures and storybook landscapes.    

Though rough by modern standards, "Achmed" is still impressive today for the sheer intricacy of the individual images, and Reiniger's ingenuity in creating various effects and illusions.  Transformations are common in her films, like the evil sorcerer who shapeshifts into different creatures to fight our intrepid hero.  Horses and princesses can fly, and the genie is one of the few characters who isn't a black silhouette - he's a ghostly light blue.  Reiniger used a rudimentary multiplane camera in "Achmed" ten years before Disney would develop theirs.  Even after the advent of sound and other improvements, her style largely remained the same.  She started using more complex, full color backgrounds in the 1950s, but the black silhouettes persisted.  Astonishingly, in the early years of her career, she largely worked alone on her animation - storyboarding, making puppets and backgrounds, and carrying out the painstaking animation process herself.  Her one major collaborator was her husband, Carl Koch, who served as her producer and cameraman.  The creation of "Achmed" took three years, from 1923 to 1926, and was completed when Reiniger was twenty-seven.     

"Achmed" wasn't considered revolutionary only because it was a feature length film, but because it was a true experiment in filmmaking technique and artistry.  It was considered a piece of avant garde cinema, before animated features were found to be commercially viable.  Reiniger only made one feature, but contributed to several others, and her output includes dozens of shorts and advertisements over many decades.  Sadly, her career was interrupted by the rise of the Nazi regime in her native Germany, and much of her work is considered lost.  Still, her influence has been considerable and persistent.  I'm constantly finding homages to her style in everything from "Samurai Jack" and "Steven Universe" to "Harry Potter."  And after all this time, she's still the only female animation director that most cinephiles can name.      

What I've Seen - Lotte Reiniger 

The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926)

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