This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.
A decade before Walt Disney Productions came into existence, making its name synonymous with animated films, there was another pioneer of the art form — Lotte Reiniger.
Reiniger’s filmmaking career spanned 60 years, during which she created more than 70 silhouette animations including versions of “Cinderella,” “Puss in Boots” and “Hansel and Gretel.” She’s perhaps best known for her 1926 silent film “The Adventures of Prince Achmed,” a fantastical adaptation of “The Arabian Nights” that was among the first full-length animated features ever made.
Charlotte Reiniger was born on June 2, 1899, in the Charlottenburg district of Berlin to Karl and Eleanor (Raquette) Reiniger. She studied at the Charlottenburger Waldschule, where she learned about scherenschnitte, the art of cutting shapes and designs in paper with scissors. The art form originated in China and later became popular in Germany.
Reiniger cut silhouettes of people, including her family members.
“I began to use my silhouettes for my playacting, constructing a little shadow theater in which to stage Shakespeare,” she wrote in 1936 in Sight and Sound magazine.
At first she wanted to be an actress, but that ambition changed when, as a teenager, she encountered the film director and actor Paul Wegenerafter a lecture he had delivered in Berlin on the possibilities of animation in cinema. Fascinated by his films, like “The Student of Prague” (1913)and “The Golem”(1915), she persuaded her parents to enroll her in a theater group at the Max Reinhardt School of Acting, where Wegener taught.
For fun she cut silhouettes of the actors in the group. Wegener was impressed.
He soon enlisted her to help with his 1918 film, “The Pied Piper of Hamelin,” an adaptation of the folk legend about a man who is hired to play his magic flute to lure away rats from a German town. When the town refuses to pay him for his services, the piper plays another tune to hypnotize the children and lead them out of the town, never to be seen again. Wegener had Reiniger help him animate wooden puppet rats for the film.
“I now had one desire — to make films,” she wrote.
Her work with Wegener led to her admission to the Institute of Cultural Research in Berlin, where she met the art historian Carl Koch. He would become her husband and a collaborator on her films.
Their first animated short was “The Ornament of the Heart in Love” (1919), about two lovers, both ballet dancers, and a morphing ornament between them that represents their emotions.
The expressive qualities of her work caught the attention of a patron, the banker Louis Hagen, who owned a film company and was looking to invest in new talent. Hagen invited her and her team of producers and designers to use his studio in Potsdam, Germany, where they worked on “Prince Achmed,” their first feature-length film.
Music, perhaps counterintuitively, was vital to the silent film, and the team worked early on with the composer Wolfgang Zeller, who made sound effects with flute notes and a glockenspiel. The team then filmed their scenes to the music, the notes driving the action and punctuating it with emotion.
Reiniger’s editing was meticulous. Starting with more than 250,000 frames, she and her crew used just over 100,000 in the film, which ran for an hour and 21 minutes, each second requiring 24 frames. It took three years to complete, and premiered in the Volksbühne, or People’s Theater, in Berlin, when Reiniger was 27.
READ MORE AT SOURCE: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/16/obituaries/lotte-reiniger-overlooked.html
QUOTE BY LOTTE REINIGER
"Your aim must be to find what kind of talent you really have and to develop it. Animation is basically not so much a technical implement as the expression of the spirit behind it. To see that that spirit goes into your shooting must be your overriding ambition." ~ Lotte Reiniger
WHAT I WISH FOR YOU TODAY
Find the expression of your spirit behind everything you do, everything you are, and then do it.