Lotte Reiniger
Based on Wikipedia: Lotte Reiniger
In 1926, a German woman released a feature-length animated film—a full decade before Walt Disney's Snow White. Her name was Lotte Reiniger, and almost nobody today knows who she is.
This is a strange kind of obscurity. Reiniger didn't just make an animated feature before Disney. She invented one of the most important devices in animation history. She pioneered an entire art form. She worked with Fritz Lang, Jean Renoir, and Bertolt Brecht. And yet, when people think of early animation, they think of Mickey Mouse.
Scissors and Shadows
Charlotte Reiniger was born in Berlin's Charlottenburg district in 1899. As a child, she attended the Charlottenburger Waldschule—the first "open-air school" in Germany, where classes were held outdoors in the belief that fresh air improved learning. There, she encountered scherenschnitte.
Scherenschnitte is the German art of paper cutting. You take a sheet of paper, usually black, and with scissors or a knife, you cut out intricate silhouettes. The tradition came to Germany from China, where shadow puppetry had been practiced for over a thousand years. In the Chinese version, performers would hold translucent puppets made from treated donkey skin against a backlit screen, creating a kind of proto-cinema in an age before electricity.
Young Lotte became obsessed.
She built her own puppet theater at home and staged shows for family and friends. While other children dreamed of becoming doctors or teachers, she dreamed of becoming an actress—but she was already translating that theatrical impulse into something stranger. She would take her favorite plays and fairy tales and recreate them as shadow puppet performances, cutting out each character, each prop, each scenic element by hand.
The Magic of Moving Pictures
As a teenager, Reiniger discovered cinema. First came the films of Georges Méliès, the French magician who essentially invented special effects. Méliès made rockets crash into the moon's eye and made women vanish in puffs of smoke. For a girl who had spent her childhood making paper figures act out impossible stories, this must have felt like a revelation: here was a way to make magic permanent.
Then she discovered Paul Wegener.
Wegener was a German actor and director who would become famous for The Golem, a 1920 film about a clay creature brought to life by a rabbi to protect the Jews of Prague. But before that, in 1915, Wegener gave a lecture on animation—on the "fantastic possibilities" the medium offered. Reiniger, sixteen years old, sat in the audience.
She convinced her parents to let her join the acting group where Wegener worked: the Theatre of Max Reinhardt, one of the most influential theatrical companies in Europe. She didn't start as an actress, though. She started backstage, making costumes and props. But she kept cutting silhouettes—of her classmates, of the actors, of anyone who held still long enough.
Wegener noticed.
Soon she was making elaborate title cards for his films, many featuring her silhouette animations. In 1918, he asked her to create animated wooden rats and intertitles for his film Der Rattenfänger von Hameln—The Pied Piper of Hamelin. The project was a success, and it earned her admission to the Institut für Kulturforschung, an experimental animation studio in Berlin.
A Gathering of Geniuses
The Institute for Cultural Research was exactly the kind of place that could exist in Weimar Germany and almost nowhere else. It was an experimental film studio where avant-garde artists gathered to push the boundaries of what cinema could be. Here, Reiniger met the playwright Bertolt Brecht, who would later write The Threepenny Opera and become one of the most influential dramatists of the twentieth century. She met Hans Cürlis, a documentary filmmaker. She met Berthold Bartosch, an animator who would later create the hauntingly beautiful film L'Idée.
She also met Carl Koch, a fellow filmmaker who would become her husband in 1921. For the rest of his life, Koch would produce and photograph her films. They were partners in both senses of the word.
In 1919, Reiniger directed her first film: Das Ornament des verliebten Herzens, or The Ornament of the Enamoured Heart. It was only five minutes long. It showed two lovers and an ornament that changed to reflect their emotional states. But it demonstrated something important: Reiniger could make silhouettes express emotion through movement alone.
This was her innovation. In the 1920s, animated characters typically relied on facial expressions—big eyes, exaggerated mouths. But silhouettes have no faces. They are pure outline, pure gesture. Reiniger's figures communicated entirely through how they moved: the tilt of a head, the sweep of an arm, the angle of a step.
The Impossible Film
Between 1919 and 1923, Reiniger made six short films. She also created advertising films for the Julius Pinschewer agency (Pinschewer sponsored many abstract animators during the Weimar period, treating commercials as a form of avant-garde art) and contributed special effects to mainstream features. Most famously, she animated a silhouette falcon for a dream sequence in Fritz Lang's Die Nibelungen, an epic retelling of German mythology.
Then, in 1923, a banker named Louis Hagen approached her with an unusual proposition.
Germany was experiencing hyperinflation—the kind where you needed a wheelbarrow of currency to buy bread, where prices doubled every few days. Hagen had bought a large quantity of raw film stock as a hedge against this chaos. (Film, unlike Reichsmarks, would retain value.) Now he wanted to do something with it.
Would Reiniger, he asked, make a feature-length animated film?
She hesitated. As Reiniger later recalled: "We had to think twice. This was a never heard of thing. Animated films were supposed to make people roar with laughter, and nobody had dared to entertain an audience with them for more than ten minutes. Everybody to whom we talked in the industry about the proposition was horrified."
She said yes anyway.
The resulting film was The Adventures of Prince Achmed, based on stories from One Thousand and One Nights. It took three years to complete. Reiniger cut every character, every background element, every prop by hand. Some of her puppets contained twenty to fifty separate pieces, joined together with thin lead wire so they could move fluidly. She developed a technique using multiple layers of backlit glass to create depth—a predecessor to what would later be called the multiplane camera, one of the most important inventions in animation history.
When she finished in 1926, no distributor would touch it. An animated feature? Who would sit through such a thing?
Jean Renoir—yes, the Jean Renoir, son of the Impressionist painter and later director of Grand Illusion and The Rules of the Game—championed the film. He helped arrange its premiere in Paris. It was a critical and popular success.
This was a full eleven years before Walt Disney released Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which is often incorrectly described as the first animated feature film. In fact, even The Adventures of Prince Achmed wasn't truly first—that honor belongs to El Apóstol, an Argentine political satire from 1917, directed by Quirino Cristiani. But El Apóstol was lost, destroyed in a fire. Reiniger's film survives. It is the oldest animated feature still in existence.
The Multiplane Problem
Let me explain why Reiniger's multiplane technique mattered so much.
In traditional animation—and in traditional photography—everything exists on a single plane. When you look at a photograph, near objects and far objects are flattened together. But in reality, when you move your head, near objects shift more than far objects. This is called parallax, and it's one of the main ways our brains perceive depth.
Reiniger realized she could create this effect by placing her artwork on multiple sheets of glass, stacked at different distances from the camera. When she moved the camera—or moved the glass planes—objects in the foreground would shift more than objects in the background. The result was a startling sense of three-dimensional space.
Disney and Ub Iwerks would develop their own, more sophisticated version of this technique in the 1930s. But Reiniger got there first, with glass planes and manual labor, a decade earlier.
The Wandering Years
After Prince Achmed, Reiniger made a second feature: Doktor Dolittle und seine Tiere, based on Hugh Lofting's English children's books about a doctor who can talk to animals. The score was composed by three different composers—Kurt Weill, Paul Hindemith, and Paul Dessau—each contributing to a different section of the film. Then, in 1929, she co-directed her first live-action film, Die Jagd nach dem Glück (The Pursuit of Happiness), a story about a shadow-puppet troupe that starred Jean Renoir himself.
She attempted a third animated feature based on Maurice Ravel's opera L'enfant et les sortilèges. The opera, with a libretto by the novelist Colette, tells the story of a naughty child who destroys the objects in his room, only to have those objects come alive and torment him. Reiniger designed sequences and animated sample scenes to convince potential backers. But she could never clear all the necessary rights—to Ravel's music, to Colette's words, to various other copyright holders. When Ravel died in 1937, the legal situation became even more tangled. Eventually, she abandoned the project.
By then, Germany had changed.
The Nazis rose to power in 1933. Reiniger and Koch were both involved in left-wing politics. They decided to leave. But leaving Germany in the 1930s was not simple. No country would give them permanent visas. For eleven years—from 1933 to 1944—they wandered from country to country, staying as long as their temporary papers would allow.
They worked with Jean Renoir in Paris. They worked with Luchino Visconti in Rome. Despite the uncertainty, they managed to make twelve films during this period. The best known are Carmen and Papageno, both based on famous operas—Bizet's Carmen and Mozart's The Magic Flute. Music became increasingly central to her work. Jean Renoir once described her animations as "visual expression of Mozart's music."
When World War II began, they were staying with Visconti in Rome. In 1944, they returned to Berlin—not by choice, but because Reiniger's mother was ill and needed care. Under Hitler's regime, Reiniger was forced to make propaganda films. One of these, Die goldene Gans (The Golden Goose), survives. You can see the constraints in the work: it is technically accomplished but creatively stifled, made under stringent conditions to please a government she despised.
London and After
In 1949, after the war, Reiniger and Koch moved to London. She made advertising films for John Grierson's General Post Office Film Unit—the same unit that would later produce the documentary Night Mail. In 1953, she reconnected with Louis Hagen Jr., the son of the banker who had financed Prince Achmed, and together they founded Primrose Productions.
Through Primrose, she made over a dozen short silhouette films based on Grimm's fairy tales for the BBC and for American television. She also illustrated a 1953 edition of King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table, written by Roger Lancelyn Green.
Carl Koch died in 1963. For a time, Reiniger retreated from public life.
But interest in her work revived. She returned to Germany. She visited the United States. She made three more films, the last of which—Die vier Jahreszeiten, or The Four Seasons—was completed in 1979, when she was eighty years old.
She was awarded the Filmband in Gold, Germany's highest film honor, in 1972. In 1979, she received the Great Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.
She died in Dettenhausen, Germany, on June 19, 1981. She was eighty-two.
The Art of Gesture
What made Reiniger's work unique was not just its technique but its aesthetic philosophy.
Her characters are not anatomically correct. They are abstractions: shapes that suggest human form without imitating it. Their arms may be too long, their fingers impossibly delicate, their proportions shifted for emotional effect. But they move with extraordinary fluidity—a quality that resembles stop-motion animation in its attention to gesture, but achieves something stop-motion cannot: true grace.
This was possible because of how she constructed her figures. Each puppet was made from tracing paper and cardboard, cut into as many as fifty separate pieces and joined with thin lead wire. The wire joints allowed for smooth, naturalistic movement. And because every piece was cut by hand, Reiniger had complete control over the exact curve of a wrist, the precise angle of a turned head.
She was also a master of metamorphosis. Transformation—a witch becoming a bird, a prince becoming a monster—is difficult in live-action film and difficult in conventional animation. But in silhouette animation, where characters are already abstractions, transformation feels natural. Reiniger exploited this constantly. Her fairy tale films are full of shape-shifting, magical changes, impossible transformations that would look absurd in any other medium.
As Reiniger herself put it, animation's greatest strength is its separation from the laws of the material world. In her shadows, anything could become anything else.
Influences and Legacy
Reiniger drew on sources from across the world. From China came the fundamental technique: shadow puppetry as an art form, using silhouettes and backlighting to create the illusion of movement. Chinese shadow puppets, historically made from donkey skin treated to be translucent and mounted on bamboo sticks, had been performed for over a thousand years. Reiniger adapted these methods to paper and film.
From Greece came Karagiozis, a traditional shadow puppet character whose comic misadventures have entertained Greek audiences for centuries. Reiniger studied these performances during her years of wandering, and their influence appears in her choice of subject matter: folk tales and fairy stories, narratives that had been passed down through generations.
From opera came her sense of structure and her integration of music. She collaborated with some of the most important composers of her era—Kurt Weill, Paul Hindemith, Paul Dessau, Wolfgang Zeller—and her films often feel like visual translations of musical scores. The puppets move to rhythm. The scenes are paced like arias and recitatives.
Her influence, in turn, has been vast if often unacknowledged. You can see her aesthetic in the silhouette sequences of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, in Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, in episodes of the animated series Steven Universe. The opening credits of Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula use extended shadow puppet sequences that are direct homages to her work.
The French animator Michel Ocelot has been explicit about her influence. His 1989 television series Ciné si employed many of Reiniger's techniques, and his later films continue to explore the possibilities of silhouette animation. But most filmmakers who borrow her visual language have probably never heard her name.
The Question of Memory
Why isn't Lotte Reiniger a household name?
Part of the answer is historical accident. She worked in Germany during the Weimar period, one of the most creatively fertile moments in cinema history—and one of the most thoroughly disrupted by what came next. The Nazis scattered the German film industry. Many of its artists fled, died, or were silenced. Those who survived often found that their pre-war work had been lost or forgotten.
Part of the answer is commercial. Reiniger never built an empire. She never created a Mickey Mouse or a Disney brand. She made films, not franchises. And films, without the machinery of merchandising and theme parks to keep them alive, can fade from cultural memory.
Part of the answer may also be gender. Animation history, like most art history, has tended to foreground men. The standard narrative runs from Winsor McCay to Walt Disney to Pixar, with occasional nods to figures like Tex Avery or Chuck Jones. Women animators have been systematically overlooked, their contributions attributed to studios or male collaborators or simply forgotten.
But perhaps the more interesting question is not why she was forgotten, but why she matters.
Reiniger demonstrated that animation could be art. Not commercial art, not children's entertainment, not novelty—but art in the fullest sense: a medium capable of beauty, meaning, and emotional depth. She did this with scissors and paper and patience, working frame by frame in an era before computers, before multiplane cameras, before any of the tools that later animators would take for granted.
She made a feature film with her hands. She invented techniques that would define the medium. She kept working into her eighties, long after the world had moved on to forms of animation she could never have imagined.
And in her silhouettes—those black shapes moving against light—she found a way to make shadows dance.