Today’s Google Doodle celebrates the 117th birthday of a little-known German animated filmmaker, Lotte Reiniger (1899-1981), with a 1½ minute animation, in her style, that you can see by clicking the screenshot below.
Here’s one of her shorter movies, “Cinderella” (“Aschenputtel”) made in 1922, several years before sound was added to movies:
Four years later she made the first full-length animated movie, “The Adventures of Prince Achmed,” which you can see here (German captions only); it antedated “Snow White”—the first such film made in English—by 11 years. Her films were immensely successful, and required tedious work: cutting out black paper silhouettes and photographing them frame by frame as they were moved. (I haven’t been able to find a video of another feature, “Doktor Doolittle und seine Tiere,” or “Doctor Doolittle and his Animals.”)
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I love her style. Very nice.
I had never known of this film maker. Quite interesting. Here’s a film where she describes her technique in some detail.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvU55CUw5Ck
Oh WOW! This must be the film my mother raved about, she was born 1925 and saw it in school. The first film she saw, created some very special memories for her.
Amazing talent with scissors!
She tells the story so well!