The poet of shadows and false signals: the story of Lotte Reininger

In a scene from the film Balzac and the little Chinese seamstress (inspired by Sijie Dai’s book of the same name), the two young protagonists end up in a communist re-education camp and tell the stories they secretly read to the people of a village, thanks to the projections of shadows, following a millenary Asian tradition that uses the paper, hands, cloths, puppets and other theatrical mechanisms. Modern animation also starts from those plays of light but, obviously, makes use of increasingly advanced techniques, especially digital. But animated series like South Park or Steven Universe they still use scraps of paper stickers. It is no coincidence that the software that encodes vector animation is called Lotte. Behind the names that characterize many Silicon Valley technological inventions, there are often references to children, to beloved women, to secret codes; in this case, the name is inspired by a legendary woman born in 1899 in Germany, without whom the shadows of Fantasy Walt Disney’s would never dance around Mickey Mouse. Who is Lotte? In the Walt Disney Museum, at the San Francisco Presidio, where she had stayed and at Pixar, there are curious references to this woman. Lotte Reiniger is not as famous as Walt Disney but the insiders know who she is. The Met, the Moma, the New York Times they have dedicated in-depth studies and retrospectives to her. There are institutions and awards in her honor and, through creative summaries and reviews, she lives a virtual second life on Youtube and Tiktok. Richard Williams who turned the genius Who framed Roger Rabbita mixed media film that combines animation and live action, won an award dedicated to her.

Cinema flourishes on the sunny West Coast to avoid the shadows of New York’s palaces and tenements but, at the same time, it carries the shadows of French magic lanterns and the avant-garde expressionism of Weimar Germany (Alan Turing was obsessed with from the witch of Snow White who personified the true political and disturbing shadows of the Nazi era). Not many know that Lotte created the first animated feature film: The Adventures of Prince Achmed in 1926 that he bases together various stories taken from The Thousand and One Nights, moves, makes you laugh, rethinks these stories for new generations, like Disney a decade later. Lotte learns the art of scherenschnitte (scraps of paper) at school, invents the techniques of the multiplane camera (for the first time a feeling of depth is given to cartoons thanks to the differentiated scrolling of backdrops) that are still used today, and above all it makes the tale of fairy tales popular in a modern, romantic, symbolic version, as if they were coming-of-age tales in the key of pop culture. She begins that world of fascination that will also characterize Disney for several generations, but with an ironically more free and contemporary approach than Aladdin (whose opening song, now at the center of controversy, defines the oriental nights, the Arabian nights as “barbaric”).

Lotte trains at school to cut out black silhouettes, then falls in love with theater and cinema seeing the films of Georges Méliès and Paul Wegener, the director of The Golem, with which he collaborates in the following years; with him, in the midst of expressionism, she pushes beyond the possibilities of animation. As she begins to imagine his films, she prepares the rats and the titles of the Pied Piper of Hamelin and meets Carl Koch, her future husband, who dated Bertol Brecht, Berthold Bartosch, Fritz Lang. Her first film The Ornament of the Enamored Heart (1919) captures the nuanced and profound emotions of two lovers and an object that binds them. With the short Cinderella (1922) is internationally recognized and creates the silhouettes of the dream sequences of Metropolis by Fritz Lang, the progenitor of dystopian films.

Lotte, in the 20s of the last century, staged different cultures with due respect and she was responsible for the first LGBTQ scene in the history of cinema (which will influence all films like Victor / Victoria, the screwball comedy and the many disguises in the 30s- 50 Hollywood). In the circles of Berlin and the world, she saw what difficulties her friends of hers had to face. With Ahmed’s Paris premiere, Lotte changes the genre of animation forever. Before it had to be short and make people laugh, now it captures big and small for an hour and a half in a serious and poetic way, despite the dominant taste is moving towards realism. She is the pioneer of avant-garde techniques with glass and light and her film Doktor Dolittle und seine Tiere (Doctor Dolittle and his Animals, 1928) is the reason for the worldwide success of the 90s remake with Eddy Murphy and the whole series of sequels (the most recent is from 2020). The list of his creations is long, with completed projects, others and many in collaboration with international directors.

When Hitler comes to power, Lotte and her husband, well-known leftist activists, are desperate for visas to be welcomed in other countries. Nobody will meet them and they will spend a decade from ’33 to ’43 living in different places but they will be helped by directors such as Jean Renoir and Luchino Visconti. In London, Lotte worked for several production companies and founded Primrose Production in 1953 and created adaptations of Grimm’s fairy tales for BBC and Telecasting America. Basically, most Western children owe her reintroduction of those fairy tales on TV (and Disney for everything else). In England she becomes friends with Freddy Bloom and designs a logo for Talk, which is still used today for the association of deaf children.

Unlike his contemporary directors, Reininger experiments with a completely new style of animation, which manages to convey the emotions of the characters in a fluid and natural way, instead of forced or exaggerated gestures, especially in facial expressions. He plays a lot on metamorphosis, that flow of transformations that is still present today in fairy tales and in animated cinema. If you grew up with the Nursery Rhymes DVDs, with the original Disney, but also that of the 2000s, with the song Friends on the Other Side from Princess and the Frog, if you grew up with the Harry Potter, Disney Channel, Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network movies there is always some reference to Lotte. The director Michel Ocelot, that of Kirikù and the witch Karabàwill resume its style in France in the 90-2000s.

Today Lotte re-emerges in viral videos and in unexpected reflections on childhood and its thinking. Two Canadian philosophers and psychiatrists, sixty-seventy-year-olds of Jungian training, Jordan Peterson and Gabor Matè have become myths of the Web. The first belongs to the conservative right and the second to the left model Žižek (critic of the neoliberal world): they fight each other on talk shows and on Tiktok. Peterson is an idol of those who think that young people today have lost their strength and ideals on too politically correct campuses, Matè survived the Shoah in Budapest in the ghetto, is almost new age and has popularized the family theory that underlies cartoons such as Encanto, so we are the product of the traumas of previous generations. Lotte had managed to channel the freedom, the attention to symbols in a creative way of even the most disturbing and psychological aspect of fairy tales in a way that satisfies both of them.

Not far from the Stanford campus, there is another woman shrouded in shadow: it is Jane Stanford, who died under incredible circumstances, a poisoning case not yet resolved. Jane founded in the 1930s the publishing house that bears her name, Stanford University Press. She had sold all her jewels and precious stones of hers by going to Queen Victoria’s Jubilee (this gesture is immortalized in a statue that depicts her offering jewels to Athena). The publishing house published Shadow Plays a digital edition with eight virtual reality simulations opposed to the analog one and crosses the cosmorama, the magic lanterns, the Lotte technology.

The modern offices of the publishing house are now in Redwood City, a minor city in Northern California, where an artist, a few years ago, drew fake shadows on the sidewalks that reflect creatively, animatedly, objects or public structures, as if to tell a story. story made up of characters. The mailbox does not have the shadow of him but that of a strange creature trying to escape and bite you, the bench a dog reminiscent of Tim Burton’s Vincent, the bicycle poles of flowers, architectural barriers that become robots.

Something similar also happens in Emeryville (California, Pixar headquarters): it is full of fake signs that show silhouettes that resemble those of the road, black on yellow, with concepts, however, that instead of guiding traffic indicate paths of the human soul: men intent on pouring out memories and knowledge, carrying worlds on their shoulders, receiving lightning in the head, looking inside with a torch. No man can detach himself from his own shadow, apart from JM Barrie’s Peter Pan (a shadow that Wendy has to mend him), and at the base of our stories there is always a shadow that comes to life, creating infinite variations of shapes illuminated by it. Sun. Who knows what Lotte would have created today? Ironically the stories of The Thousand and One Nightswith palace intrigues, desires, promises, wars, alliances, are not so different from politics and modern life and one of the best-selling video games ever is called Prince of Persia.

The Shadow is linked to every area of ​​our language, from childhood to politics, with connotations that vary but force us to reflect. On Telegraph Hill there was a time in San Francisco The Shadows (shadows), a restaurant born from a group of people who in the 40s and 50s had tried to recreate Montmartre in the shade of the hills, between the boats and the mountains of the Bay Area and had then played a role in activism for years 60-70 and finally in the current residential and climatic battles. Shadows that come and go and even return in tech language like lottefiles, a file that converts complex code that you can click on in a second. And as JM Barrie would have imagined, shadows that detach and move independently to transport us on adventures beyond time and space.