Lott Reiniger

Lott Reigniger

Born in 1899 in Berlin, Germany Lott Reiniger became a pioneer of animation.

Reiniger, creating one of her productions in (1939)-

Reiniger created animated videos using snippets of card, and wire by hand. Reiniger's videos told the stories of fairytales and the videos were a very long and meticulous process to create as she use to create her videos. Lott knew from a very early age that she wanted to work in the film industry as she looked up to such people as George Melies' and Paul Wegener. Lott was a fan of Melies' and Wegners work and she was also a very big fan of the Chinese Art if shadow puppetry. Once she had grown up to become a young woman, Lott found herself a job working on some of his films, her role would be to create the silhouettes for the inter titles in Wegenrs' films.

Reiniger's first experience working with animation was in Wegners' movie the Pied Piper of Hamlin-1918, in which he found it impossible to train live rats and guinea pigs on set. Lott was given the task of animating wooden rats using the style of stop motion animation for the film. The result of the animation was successful as Lot remembered it saying "Those rats really did move as erratically as you would expect panicky rats would an they followed the Pied Piper all right".

One of Lott's well known productions and one of the worlds first animated films would be Adventures of Prince Achmed-(1926)-

Scene from Adventures of Prince Achmed-(1926)-

Another one of her well know productions would be the production Cinderella-1922 also known as Aschenputtel in German.

A scene of Cinderella with her evil step sister scene in Lott's Cinderella-(1922)-

A scene Cinderella in Cinderella in Lott's Cinderella-(1922)-

Reiniger joined an experimental animation studio called Berliner Institut für Kulturforschung where she created 6 more of her unique productions, she collaborated with many other artists and even explained to people that her technique used for the animation was one that could be completed at home, she made a video explaining how to accomplish this. 

Image from Reiniger's tutorial video-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvU55CUw5Ck

Her technique of animation is a very unique technique, it is aesthetically appealing and a niche style of animation that would catch the eye of many viewers as it is quite different to the more familiar styles of animation such as 2D and 3D animation.

References-

• https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/jun/02/lotte-reiniger-the-pioneer-of-silhouette-animation-google-doodle
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvU55CUw5Ck  -(Tutorial video)