This post is by Colleen Gardina, Engineering Specialist in the Science & Business Reading Room.
As a huge Disney fan, I initially wanted to write a blog post about the Walt Disney Studio’s invention of the multiplane camera and how Walt Disney revolutionized the animation industry by producing the first full-length animated film.
While conducting my research, however, I was shocked to find that Disney did not invent the multiplane technique. Though Walt Disney did hold a patent and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for the multiplane camera, Lotte Reiniger was the first to develop multiplane technology that enabled the multiplane camera to add dimension to animation.
Lotte Reiniger was born in Berlin, Germany in 1899. One of her favorite hobbies growing up was “scherenschnitte,” the art of paper cutting with precise cuts. She became very adept at cutting silhouettes. Fairy tales were also an impactful part of her childhood, and she loved reinventing stories. Her passion for silhouettes and fairytales would lead her to a career in animation.
When she was seventeen, Lotte persuaded her parents to allow her to attend the Max Reinhardt School to pursue acting. However, her paper silhouettes were what got her noticed and she was hired by a famous German actor, writer, and film director, Paul Wegener, to work on her first animated film, The Pied Piper of Hamelin.
A few years later, Reiniger met her future husband, Carl Koch, who came to work with her and Wegener. Reiniger’s silhouette skills became in-demand and she and her husband began to work on more films. She and Koch produced several short, animated films in the 1920s. By 1926, Lotte had written, directed, and animated what is now considered the oldest surviving animated feature film, The Adventures of Prince Achmed, ten years before Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (It’s important to note, however, two earlier animated films were made in Argentina but are now considered lost).
The Adventures of Prince Achmed is based on elements of One Thousand and One Nights, written by Hanna Diyab. In the film, a handsome prince rides a flying horse and embarks on adventures, such as battling demons and meeting Aladdin, a lazy boy enlisted by a magician to retrieve a magic lamp from a cave.
While making the film, Lotte used her signature silhouette puppets. To aid in the animation process, she created a set-up she called a “tricktisch” or “trick table,” which housed the camera, lights and scene to be animated. However, she realized that the puppets looked two-dimensional. To give the film depth, she invented the multiplane technique.
This technique involved placing the silhouettes on horizontal planes, which were stacked and photographed from above.
Later, the Walt Disney Studios would apply this technology to develop their own multiplane camera, but the originator of the method was Lotte Reiniger.
Are you interested in watching some of Lotte’s films? The Moving Image Research Center at the Library of Congress has a selection of her films available to view by appointment:
- Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed. (1926)
- The Dancing Silhouettes. (1983)
Want to learn more about Lotte Reiniger and her work? Check out these books:
- Lotte Reiniger: eine Dokumentation (Berlin, Dt. Kinemathek, 1969)
- Otten, Karl. Der Ewige Esel, eine Jugenderzahulung mit 16 Scherenschnitten von Lotte-Koch- Reiniger (Zurich, Atlantis Verlag,1949)
- Reiniger, Lotte. Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed: 32 Bilder aus dem Silhouetten-Film von Lotte Reiniger mit einer Erzählung des Inhalts. (Berlin, Verlag Ernst Wasmuth A.G.,1926)
- Reiniger, Lotte. Shadow Theatres and Shadow Films (London, Batsford, New York, Watson-Guptill Publications, 1970)
- Robinson, Fiona. Out of the Shadows: How Lotte Reiniger Made the First Animated Fairytale Movie (New York, Abrams Books for Young Readers, 2022)
- Whitney, Grace. Lotte Reiniger: Pioneer of Film Animation (Jefferson, North Carolina, McFarland & Company, 2017)
- Winters, C.E. Cut!: How Lotte Reiniger and a Pair of Scissors Revolutionized Animation (New York, Greenwillow Books, 2023)
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