Lotte Reiniger was a German film director and the foremost pioneer of silhouette animation. Her best-known films are The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926), which is the oldest surviving feature-length animated film, and Papageno (1935). Reiniger is also noted for having devised the first form of a multiplane camera.
Charlotte "Lotte" Reiniger was born 2 June 1899 in Berlin-Charlottenburg (the part of Berlin that is in the Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf borough), German Empire.[1][2] She married Carl Koch, a film historian, in 1921, whom she met through the Berliner Institut für Kulturforschung (the Berlin Institute for Cultural Research), with which both were connected.[3][4][5] She died 19 June 1981 in Dettenhausen, West Germany.[6] She was buried in Dettenhausen Gemeindefriedhof (Dettenhausen Parish Cemetery), Dettenhausen, Tübinger Landkreis, Baden-Württemberg, Germany.[7]
Lotte Reiniger worked in the early film industry as an animator, working primarily with shadow puppets of her own design. Her work as an animator, although far less well known, predates that of Walt Disney by over a decade, her first full-length film being The Adventures of Prince Achmed, which was premiered in 1926.[8][9][10][11] The making of the film took three years.[12]
The consensus among the various scholars examining her work is that her work was extraordinary. She is credited with being "the inventor of the
multiplane camera and producer of the first animated feature film."[13] Kemp writes of her:
"Among the great figures in animated film, Lotte Reiniger stands alone. No one else has taken a specific animation technique and made it so utterly her own. To date she has no rivals, and for all practical purposes the history of silhouette animation begins and ends with Reiniger. Taking the ancient art of shadow-plays, as perfected above all in China and Indonesia, she adapted it superbly for the cinema."
Find A Grave, database and images (http://findagrave.com : accessed 9 March 2015), memorial page for Charlotte "Lotte" Reiniger (1899–1981), Find A Grave Memorial no. 133390369, citing Dettenhausen Gemeindefriedhof, Dettenhausen, Tübinger Landkreis, Baden-Württemberg, Germany; the accompanying biography by Thomas Haas (Find A Grave Member no. 48162931) is materially informative, but does not cite sources; the accompanying photograph of her grave stone by Thomas Haas (Find A Grave Member no. 48162931) is materially informative, providing a legible image of the inscribed data. The second image, depicting a shadow figure, is identified as "Scene from "The Adventures of Prince Achmed."
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