It’s quite telling that Katja Raganelli chose the animation pioneer Lotte Reiniger as her gateway figure into German cinema’s past. Like Alice Guy-Blaché, she was prolific, and worked in all kinds of formats, including commercials and animated interludes for fiction features. More than Guy-Blaché, though, she was an inventor of forms and techniques whose genius was admired by the likes of Bertolt Brecht. It says a lot about film history that Reiniger remains still a specialists’ darling…

Lotte Reiniger: Homage to the Inventor of the Silhouette Film

Portrait of the pioneer of animation films Lotte Reiniger.

Lotte Reiniger - Tanz der Schatten

Lotte Reiniger was one of the twentieth century’s major animation artists, pioneering a distinctive style of black and white silhouette animation in her interpretations of classic myths and fairy tales. Reiniger began her career in Germany, making The Adventures of Prince Achmed, one of the first and most ingenious full-length animated films in the history of cinema. After the war, she moved to Britain with her husband Carl Koch and made short films for the GPO and later, in collaboration with Primrose Productions, an extensive series of famous fairy tale short films. This is a DVD collection of her work.