'She Beat Disney By a Decade'

Lotte Reiniger's The Adventures of Prince Achmed was released a century ago in 1926. This stop-motion classic makes her "a key figure in the history of cinema".

Starting out in the film business isn't always glamorous. In the silent era, aspiring German actress Lotte Reiniger began her career on an adaptation of a folk tale, The Pied Piper of Hamelin. But she wasn't in front of the camera. Her job was to handle the rats.

Despite this inauspicious beginning, Reiniger would soon earn a place in cinema history. Just a few years after her rodent-wrangling experience, she was in the director's chair. That was extraordinary enough – in the 1920s, few women were given the opportunity to direct. But Reiniger's project was particularly innovative. Released a century ago in 1926, The Adventures of Prince Achmed is recognised as the world's oldest surviving animated feature film – despite what Walt Disney's publicists might prefer you to think. Disney's Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs is often considered to be the first ever animated feature. But Lotte beat Walt by more than a decade.

"You can't think of an equivalent to Lotte Reiniger," says Jez Stewart, Curator of Animation at the British Film Institute. "This young female artist had the vision and skills to create a timeless classic that still speaks to audiences across the world. Even 100 years on, we're still thinking, 'How did she do that?'"

Reiniger was born in Berlin in 1899. In her early years, she expressed her interest in acting through shadow puppets, cutting out silhouette figures to stage miniature Shakespeare shows. It was her skill with the scissors that got her on to the set of the Pied Piper film (she hand-cut the title cards). But it was the rats that proved most influential.

As she recalled in a 1970 book, Shadow Puppets, Shadow Theatres and Shadow Films, the animals were uncooperative: none of them would follow the Pied Piper. So, the film-makers switched to wooden rats. They shot one frame at a time, moving the models inch by inch, creating an illusion of motion when the film was played back. "This was my first encounter with animation," Reiniger said. It sparked an idea: she could bring her old-fashioned shadow puppets to life using this "stop-motion" technique.

Reiniger experimented with placing her articulated silhouette figures flat on a glass plate, lit from below. As she adjusted their movements frame by frame, a camera captured each shot from above. It was a painstaking process, requiring more than a thousand frames per minute of film. But by 1919, she had completed her first short film, The Ornament of the Loving Heart. Over the next few years, she made several more. "She was always interested in fairy tales," Stewart tells the BBC, noting her early adaptations of Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella. "She even made an advert for Nivea cream."

At that time, animation was in its infancy (Mickey Mouse wouldn't appear for another decade), so Reiniger's short films stood out. In 1923, they caught the attention of a Berlin banker, who offered to finance a longer production. "The opportunity to make a feature-length animated film at that time was an anomaly," Stewart explains. "But that anomaly was connected to the way Reiniger made films. It was an affordable, artisanal method using limited means."

- Author: Christian Kriticos, BBC

Read more ...