Shadow puppets and animation...

Wayang Kulit - Indonesian shadow puppet theater - is a unique and beautiful art form. Wayang Kulit uses puppets crafted from animal hide that are mounted on bamboo sticks and manipulated by puppeteers. When held up behind a piece of white cloth, with an electric bulb or an oil lamp as the light source, shadows are cast on the screen. Wayang Kulit plays are usually based on romantic tales, especially adaptations of the classic Indian epics, "The Mahabarata" and "The Ramayana". Some of the plays also deal with current issues or other local stories.
I showed an example of Wayang Kulit in order to show how this art form might have influenced Lotte Reiniger's cut-out silhouette animation.

Here is a excerpt of a Wayang Kulit performance.


Here is an excerpt from Lotte Reiniger's best known work, The Adventures of Prince Achmed.


Here is a little background on Lotte Reiniger - a talented and unique filmmaker and female artist (from Jeremy Heilman's blog)

Lotte Reiniger, like many German expatriate filmmakers whose film work began during the silent era, had a long and multi-chaptered career. She designed title cards for many silent films, including Paul Wegener’s The Pied Piper of Hamelin. She co-directed Running After Luck, a live-action feature starring Jean Renoir. She and her husband continued to collaborate with Renoir, working on the scripts of Grand Illusion, The Rules of the Game, and La Marseillaise. She co-wrote Girl of the Golden West, Italy’s first Spaghetti Western.

These significant accomplishments are only footnotes in Reiniger’s career, however. Her place in cinema’s history is clear and immutable. She is famed as an animator of a remarkable series of silhouette films. She took black cardboard cutouts, with moveable joints fastened by thread, and brought them to life through her distinctive, whimsical style. Decades after they were conceived, her silhouette artistry still maintains its considerable magic. From her fairy tale shorts, to her crowning achievement, The Adventures of Prince Achmed, her work has a timeless charm that feels at once delicate and sophisticated.

Reiniger’s animated work, made with the tiniest of crews, is characterized by several qualities. Her films feature remarkably fluid motion effects, which were achieved through manual manipulation of the cutouts. These cutouts were intricately detailed, lending them an uncanny verisimilitude. Beautiful, ornamental lattice work and ostentatious curves are typical features of their design. The films’ backgrounds contrast with the black silhouettes to achieve a chiaroscuro effect, which is further enhanced by the presence of gray details on the white or tinted backdrops. Even when Reiniger later experimented with full-color films, only her backdrops were colorized. Her black silhouette figures remained.

The Adventures of Prince Achmed, which was released in 1926, is undoubtedly the fullest expression of Reiniger’s talent. The oldest surviving animated feature film, it has significant historical importance, and yet its virtues extend far beyond that. This simple fairy tale draws its inspiration from “The Arabian Nights”. It tells the story of a gallant prince who is tricked by a sorcerer into being transported away from his homeland on a magical mechanical horse. The rest of the movie details his journey home, as he confronts demons and finds true love. It’s a simple, but strong, plot, which provides a perfect framework for Reiniger to showcase her art.

Reiniger would use such fairy tales throughout the rest of her career, melding the bold simplicity of their narratives to the same elements in her visual style. A series of fairy tale shorts, made mostly in 1954-1955 saw her revisiting this fertile ground. In this series of silhouette films, each about ten minutes long, she managed to relay stories that have inspired many feature films with a great deal of class and economy.

What most distinguishes Reiniger’s work, beyond its striking visual style, is its meticulous attention to detail. Her cutouts are lifelike in ways that constantly surprise. Take, for example, the moment in The Frog Prince when the King calls his three daughters to his chambers. Each is asked to catch a golden ball, which will prophesize a happy marriage for one of them. After the youngest daughter catches the ball, the scene should, by all rights, end immediately, but Reiniger allows her camera to linger. She registers the disappointment of the two princesses left behind. This fleeting moment gives a small demonstration of Reiniger’s humanism and her ability to conjure surprise in a medium that relies entirely on pre-meditation.

Such brief epiphanies are common throughout Reiniger’s work, however. Hansel and Gretel stop their narrative cold so they can contemplate nature. When an old man regrets his wife’s waste of a wish, a slapstick sequence involving some sausages and her nose unexpectedly takes over The Three Wishes. The attention to detail in each gesture astounds. This element of wit and simple sense of humanity keep Reiniger’s work feeling fresh, even in an age when Flash-based animation could be used to achieve the same visual effect easily.

Precious little in modern animation has the consistency of vision that Reiniger’s studies in profile do. So many of today’s animated films consist of empty pop-culture references and hyperactive style, while her films offer a timeless charm. They are old, but they can’t fairly be classified as quaint. No excuses need be made for them, and their fanciful, almost abstract subject matter is perfectly suited to Reiniger’s treatment. Her work reminds us that it’s the simple illusion of movement that provides so much of our so-called movie magic.