On a special note the Emile Awards Association pays tribute to leading figures of European animated cinema by awarding the Lotte Reiniger Lifetime Achievement Award.
In 2017, the European Animation Awards created the Lotte Reiniger Lifetime Achievement Award in order to recognize individuals for their lifetime contribution to the art of animation in either producing, directing, animating, design, writing, voice acting, sound and sound effects, technical work, music, professional teaching, or for other endeavors which exhibit an outstanding contribution to excellence in animation. The very first recipient of this award was Richard Williams, followed by Clare Kitson in 2018, Priit Pärn in 2024 and Vera Neubauer in 2025.
Charlotte “Lotte” Reiniger (June 2, 1899 – June 19, 1981) 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, one of the most important devices in pre digital animation. Reiniger worked on more than 40 films throughout her career.
Reiniger’s black silhouettes would become a popular aesthetic to reference in films and art. Films and television shows such as Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Steven Universe, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula all make reference to Reiniger’s style with extended animated silhouette puppet sequences. French animator Michel Ocelot has extensively shown Reiniger’s influence on his work, beginning with the 1989 television series Ciné si, which employs many of the techniques created by Reiniger, along with others of Ocelot’s own invention. Ocelot’s films, such as Princes et princesses, The Three Inventors, and Kirikou and the Sorceress showcase character designs and layouts deeply inspired by Reiniger.
Walt Disney Animation Studios used the multiplane camera extensively in films such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and The Old Mill, based on the technology that Reiniger originally developed.
Reiniger’s films were the first to move animation from solely comedic narratives. At the time, animated short films rarely had a narrative, and any narrative that they did have was shallow and only present in the film to support the character’s slapstick comedy. Throughout all of her films, both short and feature length, Reininger strives to portray serious narrative through the art of animation. Thus, gaining a much larger respect for the medium in the film industry.
Reiniger served to be one of the first filmmakers in the 20th century to attempt a portrayal of the queer experience with a pair of openly gay lovers in her film The Adventures of Prince Achmed. Although this was censored in the version of the film that was distributed to theaters, Reiniger herself was outspoken on her motivation to destigmatise homosexual realities in the world of film. “I knew lots of homosexual men and women from the film and theater world in Berlin and saw how they suffered from stigmatization.”
The municipal museum in Tübingen holds much of her original materials and hosts a permanent exhibition, “The World in Light and Shadow: Silhouette, shadow theatre, silhouette film”. The Film Museum Düsseldorf also holds many materials of Lotte Reiniger’s work, including her animation table, and a part of the permanent exhibition is dedicated to her. Collections relating to her are also held at the BFI National Archive.
On June 2, 2016, Google celebrated Reiniger’s 117th birthday with a Google Doodle about her.
The Lottie file format for vector animation, which is considered by many designers to be the best website animation format, is named for Reiniger.
In 2024, Reiniger was posthumously awarded the Winsor McCay Award at that year’s Annie Awards in recognition of her “unparalleled achievement and exceptional contributions to animation”.
Source: Wikipedia
