MP5 | Lotte Reiniger’s successor: Michel Ocelot and the updated fairytale silhouette

Posted on by Claude Lau
Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926)

As I wrote about in my posts on Lotte Reiniger, the homages to the influence of her work and her silhouette technique has been far reaching throughout animation history, even if sparse. But there is one contemporary spiritual disciple of Reiniger, whose work extensively uses both silhouette and themes of fairytale fantasy like the German pioneer, yet clearly has his own distinct style and a decidedly modern sensibility.

The French animator and director Michel Ocelot spent his childhood in then-French colony, Guinea, West Africa, then moved back to France in his adolescence. His most well-known works mainly use a fairytale format, with fantasy elements and a moral (more on that later). He has done a series of films around his African village boy hero Kirikou, but he has also used various different cultures as settings for his stories.

Princes et Princesses (2000)
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Carte blanche à Michel Ocelot - Toutes les rencontres ...
Ocelot with cutouts from ‘Princes et Princesses‘
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The best example is his series of televised fairytale fantasy shorts that he started in 1989 with Ciné Si; short fairytales from different cultures, some adaptations of existent folktales and some original concoctions, done exclusively in silhouette style. Ocelot combined cutout animation (a la Reiniger) with cel animation, which solved the problem of the analog cutout method being hard to control for precise movements. Dialog audio has become the standard for contemporary films, which was not the case for Reiniger when she made Achmed, which used intertitles for the characters’ words. By cutting in cel animations for closeup shots of his characters, Ocelot was able to achieve precise and very convincing lip sync animation.

Aside from improving upon the limitations of Reiniger’s technique, Ocelot’s enhancing treatment of the ‘fairytale’ is what truly sets him apart. Whether it be loose adaptations of existing folktales, or complete originals that he created from the ‘building blocks’ of these tales, he puts modern twists and trick endings in his stories. They clearly reflect his progressive societal views on gender, or otherwise postmodern influences, sometimes in direct response to the backwardness of traditional prince/princess tales to our modern eyes. To use his compilation film Princes et Princesses as an example: the episode ‘The Witch’ sees the male protagonist couple up with the witch he is supposed to battle, instead of the princess. In ‘The Fig Boy’, based on an Ancient Egyptian story, the Pharaoh is changed to a Pharaohess. In the tale ‘Prince and Princess’, the titular prince and princess magically switch bodies, and bicker about having to live in each other’s social role for the rest of their lives.

The whole film is available on Youtube! Turn on CC for English subtitles.
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31 Great French Movies for All Ages: Christmas Edition
Promotional poster for Azur & Asmar (2006)
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A good work of Ocelot’s to compare to Reiniger’s Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) is Ocelot’s feature Azur & Asmar (2006, released in some places with the subtitle The Princes’ Quest); both have the aesthetics and setting of Arabia, and both use motifs of Arabic fairytales.

However, the latter film is an original story by Ocelot, featuring a European protagonist and his adoptive Arabic brother. Thus Ocelot gives quite a realistic portrayal of cross-culture interactions between Europe and Arabic countries (colonialism, racism…) within a traditional fairytale story structure. It even touches on the question of cultural identity, which has been increasingly discussed throughout the 20th and 21st Centuries, and I posit that it is a reflection of Ocelot’s own multi-cultural upbringing, being French, yet being exposed to African culture in his time living in Guinea.

Rotten Tomatoes’ selection of Azur et Asmar screenshots
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Azur is also modern in the sense that it has embraced the digital age. Its animation is produced entirely in 3D, a relatively recent technical development in art and animation, which lends itself very well to the highly intricate, colorful, and decorative style of the film. Interestingly the characters are largely composed in side views, which is very much following the silhouette animation tradition.

Japanese DVD release poster, showing a sequence in which Azur uses 3D to emulate the silhouette style in his previous works.
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With the case studies of Princes and Azur I wanted to highlight Ocelot’s interesting position in the fabric of animation and wider art history. His work is a wonderful combination of folktale aesthetic, traditional tastes, and contemporary insight and modern technology. I knew about him largely because I grew up watching his films, so it made me really happy to be able to explore his historical inspiration in the early animation pioneer Lotte Reiniger in class. Although he has expressed chagrin at being so often compared to Reiniger (“I’d found Lotte Reiniger’s films rather archaic and not very attractive but I thought to myself, ‘It’ll be fine for children.“), the comparison I believe is warranted, precisely because he was able to develop upon what Reiniger had innovated.

I hope that sharing his work will lead more people outside of Europe to appreciate his ingenuity.

Referenced from:

Claudia Lau

MP2.5 | Miscellaneous Achmed-related thoughts

Posted on by Claude Lau

Because I had a lot of left over material from research for my last post on Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) and can’t stop stressing how great and important Lotte Reiniger is. Being the first feature animation is sure to make Achmed become a source for many of its successors.

By deduction I imagine it was a very early film produced in the Western world using ‘Arabia’ or Orientalism as its only visual and narrative theme. It was adapted from two stories of the ‘Middle Eastern’ fairytale collection Arabic One Thousand and One Nights, one of which is the now very familiar story of Aladdin and the Magic Lamp, made popular by its circulation in book form and by Disney’s adaptation in 1992. There is actually a ‘Prince Achmed’ in at the very beginning of the film, and I’d like to think the name is a reference to Reiniger’s Achmed, even if it isn’t confirmed.

This Achmed is definitely not Aladdin’s friend.

The harem is a common Orientalist theme, and I think we were all not expecting that scene with Achmed and the servant/entertainer girls entertaining each other in a room. It is worth mentioning that European countries never had an equivalent of the systematic Hays Code that banned ‘immoral’ content. But it seems that Reiniger just has a penchant for racy or sexual more-than-undertones, as also seen from her later short film Papageno (1935). In the handout interview Reiniger admits as much when asked directly about that Achmed scene. What a lady.

Horniness aside, this is a very cool adaptation of Papageno’s story from Mozart’s The Magic Flute; in the original opera the character Papageno is more a sidekick than a main character.

Though I have not surveyed a list of the earliest films (including live action), Achmed might be the earliest feature with a wizard or magic duel sequence, and is most definitely the earliest example of a duel that shows the characters shapeshifting. According to the TVTropes page on ‘Shapeshifter Showdowns’ as it is titled, this is a theme that has existed in human myths and folklore even before the printing press was invented. I was reminded of the Disney film Sword in the Stone (1963) which also involves a witch and a wizard/sorcerer throwing down in magical animal transformer style. Something about turning into different creatures, especially because of our associations with certain animals being good/evil or more or less powerful than other animals, is very entertaining to watch. At least it was the case for child-me, who still re-emerges when to relive watching this sequence.

A duel for the ages (of animation).

It’s noteworthy that the animation technique for changing between animals in Achmed makes more use of morphing, perhaps because of the limitations that come with cutout/silhouette. In Sword in the Stone, and also in another Disney example of a shapeshifting sequence, The Emperor’s New Groove, there is more use of special effects like sparks and jump cuts to show a character has changed animal. Arguably it makes for more interesting pacing and varied rhythm, and as we saw in today’s class (Class 6), synchrony with music was established early on as a Disney trademark method. In the promised future post on Michel Ocelot, I could talk about how this lively rhythm/music accompaniment was brought back to silhouette morphing in Princes et Princesses, but it will be for another day.

Claudia Lau

MP2 | Lotte Reiniger – Achmed’s Legacy

Posted on by Claude Lau

The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) is considered the earliest surviving animation feature film, and was seminal in both production technique and artistic height.

As mentioned in my last post, Reiniger and her team developed the precursor to the multiplane camera while working on Achmed, which was major for later mainstream animation. But Achmed is also connected to fine art animation through its team: Berthold Bartosch, who worked on special effects and backgrounds for Reiniger’s production, later used similar multi-layered glass methods for his epic tragic short The Idea (1932). Walter Ruttman was also a background artist on Achmed and his later abstract short films using film tinting techniques placed him firmly within the avant-garde filmmaking tradition.

Screencap from Achmed.

The legacy of Reiniger’s silhouette style has also lived on in animation. The most evident and notable example is French Michel Ocelot’s silhouette works; most notably his television series Ciné Si (1989), perhaps better known in its collected form in the compilation film Princes et Princesses (2000), which are exclusively in the style of silhouette animation. These works and Ocelot’s oeuvre deserves its own analysis for another post.

Art from Michel Ocelot’s Princes et Princesses.

The cutout silhouette style has been imitated in cel animation format in the 1997 anime Revolutionary Girl Utena, which was in turn referenced by Cartoon Network show Steven Universe. Steven Universe creator and showrunner Rebecca Sugar has also named Reiniger as the specific inspiration for the episode ‘The Answer’.

Screencap from Steven Universe episode ‘The Answer’

As if Achmed being the directorial debut of then 26-year-old Reiniger and her husband was not impressive enough, it was a pioneering film in form and technique, and has been paid homage to as such up until the 21st Century. Here is a Gobelins Annecy 2015 short that pays tribute to Reiniger and Koch, and includes a subtle hint at the political adversity they faced in World War II Germany in parallel to their partnership in works of art.

Claudia Lau

MP1 | Inventions from both sides of the Atlantic

Posted on by Claude Lau

In the first two weeks of class we covered the early years, from animation toys, to the creation of full films with sound and the pioneering of many important animation processes. It’s a lot, though we haven’t even looked at anything Disney yet.

What it made me realize was that animation history was less of a line than a zig-zag: the back and forth process of invention and industrialization, as well as the cross-pollination of animation techniques between Europe and America. All were important factors in the development of the animation as an art form and as an industry.

The two sides of the Atlantic circa 1900 (source)

Early inventions in what we now think of as animation mostly came from Europe. Frenchman Émile Reynaud created the first film projection animations or Théätre Optique in 1888, expanding from earlier toys such as the phenakistocope and zoetrope, attributed to Joseph Plateau (Belgium) and William G. Horner (UK) respectively. As early as the zoetrope however, Americans tapped into industry and manufacturing; American William Ensign Lincoln licensed his version of the zoetrope to the board game company Milton Bradley and Co. in 1865-66.

Of course what interests us is the techniques that have become standard. John Randolph Bray (US) and Raoul Barré (Canada/US) were important in creating both technical processes, such as celluloid [cels] and the hole and peg system, and production processes, i.e. the industrial animation pipeline; all three are still in use in some form or another today, speaking to how influential their inventions were. Interestingly, Barré, with Bill Nolan, was also the first to make animated adverts, and created the first 100% animation focused studio.

Different peg bar systems, from article on the history of the peg bar

The first character driven animation, or perhaps ‘animated cartoon’, was Emile Cohl’s (France/US) Fantoche the Clown in 1908; American cartoons included Krazy Kat (1916), Felix the Cat (Pat Sullivan and Otto Messmer 1919), and Fleischer studios’ iconic characters (1920s-30s). And of course later on we’ll meet Mickey Mouse, most iconic of all animated cartoons.

American Winsor McCay is an interesting case; the naturalistic draftsmanship he used from his illustration background elevated animation to a new level. He also pioneered technical animation methods such as inbetweening and cycles/loops as shown in Gertie the Dinosaur (1913), for which John Randolph Bray tried to sue him after patenting those methods. Gertie also carries the legacy of animation as performance and showmanship like with early pioneers Georges Méliès (France) and James Stuart Blackton (US).

A frame from Gertie the Dinosaur – notice the ‘stop here’ instruction, presumably for the assistant (source)

Animation was exclusively in short film form, until the first European feature-length animation films. They include El Apostol (1917) and Peludopolis (1930) by Italian-Argentinian Quirino Cristiani, the second of which was the first with sound, and The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) by German Lotte Reiniger and her team. Achmed in particular seems important to me, as its use of the multiplane glass technique allowed for many-layered backgrounds that further pushed animation towards a truly cinematic look, and was an early version of the multiplane camera, which was used in Disney’s first feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), and allowed it great compositional depth.

Lotte Reiniger and the early multiplane camera

We always think of Disney when we think of animation history. In a way, Disney’s Golden Age is kind of an ‘Italian Renaissance’ of animation, because it married both industrial efficiency and artistic height. But without seeing the historical context before and at the time of Disney’s birth, we could easily forget the early origins and all the other milestones that allowed Disney to flourish.

Claudia Lau

Major Post 3: Reiniger

Posted on by LeAnn Schmitt

             When we think of famous animators I bet we all jump talented and influential names like Don Bluth, Walk Disney, Glen Kean, James Baxter, and of course Richard Williams. But I doubt you can name as many female animators. I always knew there were women working in the animation industry way back in the 20s but I never saw them doing more than just coloring cells or painting backgrounds. So, when the Professor mentioned a female animator who wasn’t just a names-less colorist but a creator with full artistic responsibility over an animation I perked up.

             This woman was none other than Lotte Reiniger. A German woman who fled Nazi Germany for the safety of England in the 1935. She was an artist fully influenced by pre-WWII Berlin Germany. She was credited for making and contributing over sixty films in her life time but she was best known for her pioneering silhouette animations. Examples of her work are found in films like The Adventures of Prince Achmed and The Beautiful Princess of China and The Lost Shadow. Although, her works were awe-inspiring and critically acclaimed by audiences she had difficulty getting funding for her projects through most of her career. So, in order to fund her projects she worked for Julius Pinschewer, an early producer of advertising. It is said that two of the four ads she created for them have survived to this day (one of which I included a link to below).

             In the end, learning about Reiniger and all the hard work she put into her craft was inspiring and made me wonder how many other unknown female pioneers of animation are there out there.

LeAnn Schmitt