Celebrate the New Year with the latest news from the world of animation … from a century in the past! Visit the Animation Magazine website now to read my latest Animation Time Machine column.
Here’s an extract to whet your appetite:
The Animation Time Machine sped across the Atlantic to Europe, where it discovered a fascinating article in the January 1924 edition of Der Kinematograph, Germany’s first film trade journal.
Entitled “The Silhouette Film,” the article introduces Lotte Reiniger who, having learned the German art of “Scherenschnitte” — literally “scissor cuts” — adapted her skills to create a number of films in which she animated cut-out figures frame by frame.
Innovative at every level, Reiniger stacked her silhouettes one atop the other and moved them in varying increments to create immersive parallax effects — over a decade before Walt Disney perfected the technique with his multiplane camera.
The most famous of Reiniger’s silhouette films is The Adventures of Prince Achmed, an adaptation of Arabic folk stories from One Thousand and One Nights, including Aladdin. Released in Germany in 1926, the film is generally regarded as the world’s oldest animated feature. It remains a remarkably sophisticated example of early animation.
Read the complete article at Animation Magazine to get the full scoop!
Graham Edwards 