Thursday, June 2, 2016

Happy birthday Lotte Reiniger

Lotte Reiniger was the first pioneer of animated film. She did all the work with cutout paper silhouettes.

Born 2 June 1899 in the Charlottenburg district of Berlin, she was a German film director and the foremost pioneer of silhouette animation. Reiniger made more than 40 films over her career, all using her invention. Her best known films are The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) – the oldest surviving feature-length animated film, preceding Walt Disney's feature-length Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) by over ten years – and Papageno (1935), featuring music by Mozart. Reiniger is also noted for devising a predecessor to the first multi-plane camera. (From Wikipedia article)

Google had a Google Doodle link to her today in honor of her 117th birthday and the great work she did all by hand. I really like what she did. Silhouette animation has a lot going for it. There plenty of her films on YouTube. Here is a documentary made about her back in the 50's I think.