CUT!

The creator of the world’s oldest surviving full-length animated film is celebrated in this straightforward biography.

Born in 1899, Lotte Reiniger was enthralled by the cinema and would tell her own stories to other children by creating tales with cut-paper silhouettes. That skill turned out to have big benefits when she caught the attention of director Paul Wegener. Soon she was designing and directing short films of her own. It was when she was offered the daunting proposal to try her hand at a full-length animated feature film—The Adventures of Prince Achmed—that she invented the tricktisch, a wooden tower that would allow her to film scenes with multiple panes of glass, aka the first multiplane camera. Winters keeps the storytelling crisp and to the point, avoiding any mention of Achmed’s racial stereotyping. Schu’s art, meanwhile, brings the magic of Reiniger’s cut paper technique to life on these pages, integrating the silhouettes with her trials and triumphs. The book is not without its charms but sadly lacks the originality that made Reiniger the master of visual arts as we remember her today. Pairing this book with Fiona Robinson’s Out of the Shadows: How Lotte Reiniger Made the First Animated Fairytale Movie (2022) could allow for a more rounded look at this pioneering artist’s life. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

An unadorned telling of an artist deserving of additional praise.