Lotte Reiniger

For three years during the 1920s, in an attic in Potsdam, a young woman crafted what is today the oldest surviving animated feature film. Equipped with scissors, cardboard, sheets of lead, glass panes and a camera, animation pioneer Lotte Reiniger filmed Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed (The Adventures of Prince Achmed) using a technique of frame-by-frame silhouette animation she developed, inspired by Chinese shadow puppetry. As the result of a number of factors—her gender, her German ethnicity, World War II and a lack of funding—Reiniger became a footnote in animation history. Yet her 60–plus films plainly show her skill and dedication to her craft. This detailed account of her life and work describes her significant contributions to animation, puppetry, Weimar cinema and modern filmmaking.

An innovative picture book biography about an unsung hero of early animation Lotte Reiniger (1899-1981) was a German film director and animator best known for The Adventures of Prince Achmed, which was released in 1926 and is the oldest surviving animated movie. (It came out a full 11 years before Disney's Snow White!) As a little kid, Reiniger loved reading fairytales and fell in love with puppetry. At school, she learned about paperschnitte, or papercuts, which helped her create her signature style of silhouettes. She grew up to make more than 40 films throughout her long career, most of which were fairytales that used her stop-film animation technique of hand-cut silhouettes. Reiniger is now seen as the foremost pioneer of silhouette animation and the inventor of an early form of the multiplane camera. With art inspired by Reiniger's cut-paper style and a text that uses a fairytale motif that mimics her movies, Out of the Shadows is a sweeping tribute to one of most important figures of animation, whose influence still resonates today.

Lotte Reiniger (1899-1981) is a much loved figure in the early history of animated film. At an early age Reiniger discovered the Chinese art of silhouette puppetry, and made her first silhouettes for a school performance. Growing up during the early years of cinema, she fell in love with the films of Georges Méliès and Paul Wegener, and found imaginative ways to adapt the craft of silhouette-making and shadow puppetry to the possibilities of animation. Reiniger elicited marvelous effects of motion from the inflexibility of silhouettes, and even introduced cultural quotations from the works of Charlie Chaplin or Josephine Baker into her magical films. Today she is best remembered for the animation masterpiece The Adventures of Prince Achmed. This book--the first on Reiniger in English--reproduces three of her most beautiful silhouette series: versions of Mozart's Magic Flute and The Marriage of Figaro, and an animal alphabet.

This book examines the relationship that exists between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation. Animation has played a key role in defining our collective expectations and experiences of fantasy cinema, just as fantasy storytelling has often served as inspiration for our most popular animated film and television. Bringing together contributions from world-renowned film and media scholars, Fantasy/Animation considers the various historical, theoretical, and cultural ramifications of the animated fantasy film. This collection provides a range of chapters on subjects including Disney, Pixar, and Studio Ghibli, filmmakers such as Ralph Bakshi and James Cameron, and on film and television franchises such as Dreamworks’ How To Train Your Dragon (2010–) and HBO’s Game of Thrones (2011–).

This comprehensive guide is an ideal reference work for film specialists and enthusiasts. First published in 1984 but continuously updated ever since, CineGraph is the most authoritative and comprehensive encyclopedia on German-speaking cinema in the German language. This condensed and substantially revised English-language edition makes this important resource available to students and researchers for the first time outside its German context. It offers a representative historical overview through bio-filmographical entries on the main protagonists, from the beginnings to the present day. Included are directors and actors, writers and cameramen, composers and production designers, film theorists and critics, producers and distributors, inventors and manufacturers. An appendix includes short introductory essays on specific periods and movements, such as Early Film, Weimar, Nazi Cinema, DEFA, New German Cinema, and German film since unification, as well as on cinematic developments in Austria and Switzerland. Sections that crossreference names around specific professional groups and themes will prove equally invaluable to researchers.

Throughout its history, animation has been fundamentally shaped by its application to promotion and marketing, with animation playing a vital role in advertising history. In individual case study chapters this book addresses, among others, the role of promotion and advertising for anime, Disney, MTV, Lotte Reiniger, Pixar and George Pal, and highlights American, Indian, Japanese, and European examples. This collection reviews the history of famous animation studios and artists, and rediscovers overlooked ones. It situates animated advertising within the context of a diverse intermedial and multi-platform media environment, influenced by print, radio and digital practices, and expanding beyond cinema and television screens into the workplace, theme park, trade expo and urban environment. It reveals the part that animation has played in shaping our consumption of particular brands and commodities, and assesses the ways in which animated advertising has both changed and been changed by the technologies and media that supported it, including digital production and distribution in the present day. Challenging the traditional privileging of art or entertainment over commercial animation, Animation and Advertising establishes a new and rich field of research, and raises many new questions concerning particular animation and media histories, and our methods for researching them.

This collection of essays by Rudolph Arnheim (film criticism, U. of Michigan) explores film theory, criticism, and many classic films from the silent and early sound period (the 1920s and early 1930s). The majority of essays included in this collection were written and published in Berlin during the Weimar Republic, and have been translated into English for the first time. Arnheim argues that up until 1930, film artists created pure forms of cinema crafted with a narrative economy which could unify the most varied of effects. As movies became more realistic looking due to technical advances, cinema began to lose its integrity and viability. Paper edition (unseen), $18.95. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR