Silhouette animation is animation in which the characters are only visible as black silhouettes. This is usually accomplished by backlighting articulated cardboard cut-outs, though other methods exist. It is partially inspired by, but for a number of reasons technically distinct from, shadow play.
Inspired by both European shadow play (ombres chinoises) and European silhouette cutting (Etienne de Silhouette and Johann Caspar Lavater), the medium of silhouette animation in film seems to have invented independently by several people at around the same time, the earliest known being the short subject The Sporting Mice (1909) by British filmmaker Charles Armstrong. The first to have survived is the same director's The Clown and His Donkey (1910). This, and at least one other of Armstrong's films (some stills of which have survived by being reproduced in a book by Georges Sadoul), is in white silhouette on a plain black background. It is, however, most likely that neither the German animator Lotte Reiniger nor the American puppeteer Tony Sarg knew of his work, and it was Reiniger who first established many of what are now the standard practices of the formant with her first film, Das Ornament des verliebten Herzens (The Ornament of the Enamoured Heart, 1919). [1]
Reiniger's feature film Die Geschichte des Prinzen Achmed (The Adventures of Prince Achmed, 1926) – one of the oldest of all animated features – coincided with a revival of interest in silhouettes and sparked off several imitators. Her influence is evident as far away as Japan, with Toshio Suzuki's Yonjunin no Tozoku (Forty Burglars, 1928), and as early as 1924, with Hidehiko Okuda, Tomu Uchida and Hakuzan Kimura's Kanimanji Engi (The Tale of Crab Temple). A few silhouette films have also been produced by the National Film Board of Canada.
Today, pure silhouette films made professionally are rare, and fewer still are animators who work primarily within its confines. However, sequences of digital and drawn silhouette animation can be seen, for example, in South Park when the lights are turned off, in an episode of Mona the Vampire (1999) and intermittently in the animation of Sayonara Zetsubō-Sensei (2007) and in a few levels in Donkey Kong Country Returns (2010).
Traditional silhouette animation as invented by Reiniger is subdivision of cutout animation (itself one of the many forms of stop motion). It utilizes figures cut out of paperboard, sometimes reinforced with thin metal sheets, and tied together at their joints with thread or wire (usually substituted by plastic or metal paper fasteners in contemporary productions) which are then moved frame-by-frame on an animation stand and filmed top-down with a rostrum camera – such techniques were used, albeit with stylistic changes, by such practitioners as Noburō Ōfuji in the 1940s and Bruno J. Böttge in the 1970s. Michel Ocelot's television series Ciné si (Cinema If, 1989) was a little different, combining cutouts and cels and also, more occasionally, live-action and clay animation (this series is better known as Princes et princesses, the feature film version mentioned below). [2] This was also the first silhouette animation to successfully make characters appear to speak for themselves (traditionally, either intertitles or voice-over narration had been used) as the mixed medium made accurate lip syncing possible. Traditional animation can also be used to imitate silhouette animation, as seen regularly in Be-PaPas' Shōjo Kakumei Utena (Revolutionary Girl Utena, 1997).
Most recently, several CGI silhouette films have been made, which demonstrate different approaches to the technique – Jossie Malis' use already 2D, vector animation, Michel Ocelot's "Earth Intruders" (2007) and a scene in Azur et Asmar (Azur & Asmar, 2006) use 3D figures rendered as silhouettes, while Anthony Lucas' Academy Award-nominated The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello (2005) mixes 2D characters and 3D backgrounds, both of which are combination of live action and CGI. Computer animation has also been used to make more explicit reference to shadow theatre – particularly of the Southeast Asian wayang kulit style – by adding visible rods to the characters which appear to be operating them (ironically, in CGI, it is the other way round). This was used in Jan Koester's Our Man in Nirvana (2006) and the opening of the Disney feature The Jungle Book 2 (2003). Michel Ocelot's television series Bergères et dragons (Shepherdesses and Dragons), which, as of March 2008, is still in development, uses a mixture of 2D and 3D computer animation to simulate the look of his earlier, analogue silhouette animation.
However, traditional, cutout silhouette animation is still practised to this day by such people as Edward S. de Leon and Reza Ben Gajra, where it is often combined with other forms of stop motion animation such as Lumage.
Silhouette films are traditionally monochrome, with the foreground solid black and the background being various shades of grey – the more distant an elements in intended to be, the paler the shade of grey, thus creating an illusion of depth. In Die Geschichte des Prinzen Achmed, different scenes were tinted in different all-over colours, as was the standard practice among features of the time. Das Geheimnis der Marquisin (The Marquise's Secret, 1922) is a reversed, white-on-black silhouette film. Jack and the Beanstalk (1955), which Reiniger was forced to shoot in colour, uses full-colour painted backgrounds with the black silhouettes, some of which are inlaid with translucent, coloured, "sweet wrapper" material for a stained glass effect. Though she seems to have made the most of this expanded format, she disapproved of it herself and returned to monochrome films for most of her remaining career, [3] perhaps finding an acceptable middle ground with Aucassin et Nicolette (Aucassin and Nicolette, 1976), which used a more restrained colour palette for its backgrounds (which were built out of pieces of translucent plastic).
Among other, later filmmakers, the dominant method of shooting silhouette films in colour has been to imitate the tinted look of Prinzen Achmed by using backgrounds with many different tones of one colour, or sometimes two close or complementary colours. Full-colour cutout animation in which the characters are mainly seen in profile is sometimes described as colour silhouette film, though this is dependent on one's definition of a silhouette, as opposed to profile or side-on viewpoints in general.
Note: Ōfuji's and Ocelot's features are compilations of earlier series of shorts.
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Animation is the method that encompasses myriad filmmaking techniques, by which still images are manipulated to create moving images. In traditional animation, images are drawn or painted by hand on transparent celluloid sheets (cels) to be photographed and exhibited on film. Animation has been recognized as an artistic medium, specifically within the entertainment industry. Many animations are computer animations made with computer-generated imagery (CGI). Stop motion animation, in particular claymation, has continued to exist alongside these other forms.
Carl Koch or Karl Koch was a German art historian, film director and writer with many secondary credits including collaborations with his wife Lotte Reiniger, the animator of The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926). In these collaborations, Koch often managed the camera work, which was mounted above Reiniger's animation table.
While the history of animation began much earlier, this article is concerned with the development of the medium after the emergence of celluloid film in 1888, as produced for theatrical screenings, television and (non-interactive) home entertainment.
Oskar Wilhelm Fischinger was a German-American abstract animator, filmmaker, and painter, notable for creating abstract musical animation many decades before the appearance of computer graphics and music videos. He created special effects for Fritz Lang's 1929 Woman in the Moon, one of the first sci-fi rocket films, and influenced Disney's Fantasia. He made over 50 short films and painted around 800 canvases, many of which are in museums, galleries, and collections worldwide. Among his film works is Motion Painting No. 1 (1947), which is now listed on the National Film Registry of the U.S. Library of Congress.
Berthold Bartosch was a film-maker, born in Polaun, in the Bohemia region of Austria-Hungary.
Charlotte "Lotte" Reiniger was a German film director and the foremost pioneer of silhouette animation. Her best known films are The Adventures of Prince Achmed, from 1926, the oldest surviving feature-length animated film, and Papageno (1935). Reiniger is also noted for having devised, from 1923 to 1926, the first form of a multiplane camera. Reiniger worked on more than 40 films throughout her career.
Traditional animation is an animation technique in which each frame is drawn by hand. The technique was the dominant form of animation in cinema until the end of the 20th century, when there was a shift to computer animation in the industry, specifically 3D computer animation.
Cutout animation is a form of stop-motion animation using flat characters, props and backgrounds cut from materials such as paper, card, stiff fabric or photographs. The props would be cut out and used as puppets for stop motion. The world's earliest known animated feature films were cutout animations, as is the world's earliest surviving animated feature Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed (1926) by Lotte Reiniger.
The multiplane camera is a motion-picture camera that was used in the traditional animation process that moves a number of pieces of artwork past the camera at various speeds and at various distances from one another. This creates a sense of parallax or depth.
Walter Ruttmann was a German cinematographer and film director, an important German abstract experimental film maker, along with Hans Richter, Viking Eggeling and Oskar Fischinger. He is best known for directing the semi-documentary 'city symphony' silent film, with orchestral score by Edmund Meisel, in 1927, Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis. His audio montage Wochenende (Weekend) (1930) is considered a major contribution in the development of audio plays.
The Adventures of Prince Achmed is a 1926 German animated fairytale film by Lotte Reiniger. It is the oldest surviving animated feature film; two earlier ones were made in Argentina by Quirino Cristiani, but they are considered lost. The Adventures of Prince Achmed features a silhouette animation technique Reiniger had invented which involved manipulated cutouts made from cardboard and thin sheets of lead under a camera. The technique she used for the camera is similar to Wayang shadow puppets, though hers were animated frame by frame, not manipulated in live action. The original prints featured color tinting.
Strata-cut animation, also spelled stratcut or straticut, is a form of clay animation, itself one of many forms of stop motion animation.
Michel Ocelot is a French writer, designer, storyboard artist and director of animated films and television programs and a former president of the International Animated Film Association. Though best known for his 1998 debut feature Kirikou and the Sorceress, his earlier films and television work had already won Césars and British Academy Film Awards among others and he was made a chevalier of the Légion d'honneur on 23 October 2009, presented to him by Agnès Varda who had been promoted to commandeur earlier the same year. In 2015 he got the Lifetime Achievement Award at the World Festival of Animated Film - Animafest Zagreb.
Azur & Asmar: The Princes' Quest is a 2006 French-Spanish-Belgian-Italian computer-animated fairytale fantasy film written and directed by Michel Ocelot and animated at the Paris animation and visual effects studio Mac Guff Ligne. It was released in theaters in North America as just Azur & Asmar.
Ciné si is a 1989 French silhouette animation television series conceived, written and directed by Michel Ocelot and realised at La Fabrique, consisting of short fairy tale and retrofuture stories performed by the same animated "actors". A critical success but commercial failure at the time, no further episodes were commissioned beyond the initial eight but following the success of Ocelot's Kirikou and the Sorceress six were edited into the 2000 compilation movie Princes et Princesses, in which form they finally saw wide exposure and acclaim both in France and internationally; a further episode was included in a home release of short works in 2008 but one remains unavailable for public consumption.
The Insensitive Princess is a 1983 French animated television series written and directed by Michel Ocelot. The animation is a combination of cel and cutout animation while the elaborate architectural style of the production design has been said to be reminiscent, through visual association, of Charles Perrault and Jean de La Fontaine's fairy tales; like Ocelot's Les Trois Inventeurs before it and several episodes of the later Ciné si it takes place in a literary fairy-tale fantasy setting, specifically a palatial theater, which mixes the ornate styles of decoration and dress of the upper classes of both the time of the Ancien Régime and the Belle Époque and includes such fanciful technology as a baroque submarine, elements of outright fantasy such as dragons and such anachronisms as a reference to motorcycles.
Noburō Ōfuji was a Japanese film director and animator. One of the most notable auteurs of anime, he worked primarily with cutout and silhouette animation. He also made a number of films in traditional animation, using then-expensive, imported cels, while his earliest work known to have survived is a live-action/animated film. He trained under Jun'ichi Kōuchi before starting his own company. He is known for his employment of washi, especially the coloured and patterned Edo chiyogami, which gives his films a distinctively Japanese appearance. He was one of the first Japanese animators to earn international recognition for his work.
Dragons et Princesses is a 2010 French computer animation television program written, storyboarded and directed by Michel Ocelot and produced at Studio O for Canal+. It is a fairy tale anthology series of ten further 13-minute episodes in the format established in Ciné si, though made in computer animation rendered in a silhouette instead of traditional silhouette animation made with backlit cut-outs. Five of the episodes are edited, with a feature-exclusive sixth, into the 2011 stereoscopic compilation movie Tales of the Night.
Princes et Princesses is a 2000 compilation film by French animator Michel Ocelot.
Spanish animation refers to animation made in Spain.
