Lotte Reiniger: Born With Enchanting Hands: Three Silhouette Sequels

by Lotte Reiniger (Artist), Evamarie Blattner (Editor), Karlheinz Wiegmann (Editor)

Lotte Reiniger (1899–1981) is a much loved figure in the early history of animated film. At an early age Reiniger discovered the Chinese art of silhouette puppetry, and made her first silhouettes for a school performance. Growing up during the early years of cinema, she fell in love with the films of Georges Méliès and Paul Wegener, and found imaginative ways to adapt the craft of silhouette-making and shadow puppetry to the possibilities of animation. Reiniger elicited marvelous effects of motion from the inflexibility of silhouettes, and even introduced cultural quotations from the works of Charlie Chaplin or Josephine Baker into her magical films. Today she is best remembered for the animation masterpiece The Adventures of Prince Achmed . This book--the first on Reiniger in English--reproduces three of her most beautiful silhouette versions of Mozart’s Magic Flute and The Marriage of Figaro , and an animal alphabet.

112 pages, Hardcover

First published March 31, 2012

About the author

Charlotte "Lotte" Reiniger was a German film director and the foremost pioneer of silhouette animation. Her best known films are The Adventures of Prince Achmed, from 1926—thought to be one of the oldest surviving feature-length animated films—and Papageno (1935). Reiniger is also noted for having devised a predecessor to the first multiplane camera; she made more than 40 films, all using her invention.