Lotte that Silhouette Girl is a short animated documentary about the fantastic and creative life of film pioneer Lotte Reiniger, who was a rockstar of an animator. She invented the multiplane camera and created the first feature length animation. Lotte that Silhouette Girl is an homage to her, told in Lotte’s style, with stop motion shadow animation and through a lens of folktale storytelling. For many unjust reasons, Lotte is just a footnote in the history of film, but she revolutionized animation and made it what it is today. In this short film, Lotte’s puppets have come back to life to set the story straight.

BBC Four’s new documentary takes us on a journey through more than a century of animation. It examines the creative and technical inventiveness of some of the great animation pioneers who have worked in Britain – trailblazing talents such as Len Lye, John Halas and Joy Batchelor, Joanna Quinn, and Bristol’s world-conquering Aardman Animations.

Portrait of the pioneer of animation films Lotte Reiniger.

This short documentary looks at the animated art of Lotte Reiniger. We are taken through a demonstration by Lotte herself on the way she cut out, constructed and filmed a silhouette character. She also discusses how she developed the use of coloured gelatines for her backgrounds. To illustrate her output, the documentary includes extracts from several of her films including Papageno (1935), The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) and The Frog Prince.

It’s quite telling that Katja Raganelli chose the animation pioneer Lotte Reiniger as her gateway figure into German cinema’s past. Like Alice Guy-Blaché, she was prolific, and worked in all kinds of formats, including commercials and animated interludes for fiction features. More than Guy-Blaché, though, she was an inventor of forms and techniques whose genius was admired by the likes of Bertolt Brecht. It says a lot about film history that Reiniger remains still a specialists’ darling…