Wondering who is responsible for that adorable and whimsical silhouetted animation playing on your desktop in today’s Google Doodle? That would be groundbreaking German director and animator Charlotte “Lotte” Reiniger who would have turned 117 years old today. Not only remembered by Google, Reiniger’s pioneering artistic innovations are also celebrated by a series of fantastical GIFs via Curbed, created from a selection of her over forty films.
Born in 1899, Reiniger admitted she “could cut out silhouettes almost as soon as I could manage to hold a pair of scissors.” By 1918, Reiniger made the animated titles for Paul Wagner’s The Pied Piper of Hamelin and began to embark on her own imaginative animation career. Hand-cutting black cardboard puppets, Reiniger painstakingly captured their movements frame-by-frame on a camera she invented that preceded the now frequently used multiplane camera.
While many of her short films stick with familiar fairytales like Hansel and Gretel and Jack and the Beanstalk, Reiniger’s best-known accomplishment is her 1926 full-length feature film The Adventures of Prince Achmed–her version on The Arabian Nights. Even though it took three years to complete, The Adventures of Prince Achmed predates Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs by over a decade.
With many of Reiniger’s films available on YouTube, her lasting influence remains extensive. Although Curbed points to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1’s animated fairytale sequence as a prime example of her continued legacy, I can’t help but see glimpses of artist Kara Walker’s abject and subversive take on Antebellum aesthetics in Reiniger’s iconic silhouetted style.
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