Welcome!
Welcome to the new Animation Snack, brought to you by MyToons.com! This is the place for tasty tidbits on All Things Animated! Stay tooned here everyday for animation news, intimate interviews, exciting contests, great prizes and events. It's easy to comment & connect with animation industry experts, artists and fans.
Join the MyToons team in celebrating art, animation and the creative culture!
Dig in and enjoy your Animation Snack!
Want more than just a taste? Visit MyToons.com for tons of toons, art, entertainment, and the world's greatest animation community.
Rusty's Ramblings
Welcome to Rusty’s Ramblings – a quick peek through the eyes of Emmy Award-Winning Rusty Mills, producer and director on Pinky & The Brain and Animaniacs.
This week from Rusty…
I recently had the privilege of seeing The Adventures of Prince Achmed (Die Abenteur des Prinzen Achmed), a 1926 animated film by Lotte Reiniger. A stunning cutout stop motion animation, Prince Achmed is done almost entirely in silhouette.
Though there are several films that can be considered the first animated feature film, Prince Achmed is one that still stands proudly. One of the interesting facts about this film is the director, Lotte Reiniger. During a time women rarely directed films or animated, Lotte Reiniger had a
unique vision and talent for cutouts. Focusing her fascination with film, she was able to bring this astonishing art to the screen.
Detailed cutouts characterize Lotte Reiniger’s work and make it unique. Although others have tried to copy her by doing shadow puppets in real time, it is her use of stop motion that brings these silhouettes to life. She developed a process of filming down through multiple layers of glass. This helped the repositioning of the puppets from interfering with the intricate background and foreground layers or other puppets. Throughout the production of Prince Achmed, she and her crew began to experiment with alternate types of backgrounds, which included using soap to draw on some of the glass layers.
One of the fundamentals that animators always learn is to give your character good silhouette. In traditional 2D and 3D animation, this means to be sure your audience can understand the pose the character is in even if it were made into a solid silhouette. Studying Lotte’s work is an excellent way to help improve your silhouette posing. Her technique forced the animators to stage everything so you can understand what is happening in the story.
Lotte Reiniger died in 1981, but she left behind a prolific body of work. As film became more sophisticated, she added sound and color. In her later films, she began to use painted backgrounds and experiment with other types of paper that added texture and allowed backgrounds to show through. Silhouette animation is just another example of how varied stop motion can be.
Intrigued? Click here to learn more about Lotte and her work!
