Overlooked No More: Lotte Reiniger, Animator Who Created Magic With Scissors and Paper

When Hitler was in power, Reiniger and her husband left Germany for France, Italy and England, where they collaborated with other puppeteers, funders and artists before returning to Berlin in 1944 to look after Reiniger’s mother. In 1948 they moved to London, where they joined a nearby artists’ colony. Reiniger then directed a series of short children’s films for the BBC.

Her husband died in 1963, and she stopped making films. But in 1972 she was recognized with the Golden Reel Award at the Berlin Film Festival for her contributions to German cinema. Two years later, the Goethe Institute sponsored her on a lecture tour of Canada and the United States.

“A Reiniger revival swept North America,” the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail wrote.

The tour inspired her to make a few final short films, including “The Rose and the Ring” (1979), a 24-minute adaptation of the 1854 satirical work of fiction by William Makepeace Thackeray, and “Düsselchen and the Four Seasons,” a two-minute film completed in 1980. She died on June 19, 1981, in Dettenhausen, Germany. She was 82.

Though The New York Times did not take note of her death at the time, the Times film critic A.O. Scott recalled her in a 2018 article about the unsung women who had advanced the art of filmmaking.

Praising Reiniger’s “blend of whimsy and spookiness,” Mr. Scott wrote that her “dreamy images that seem to tap right into the collective unconscious suggest both an antidote to Disney and a precursor to Tim Burton.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/16/obituaries/lotte-reiniger-overlooked.html?emc=rss&partner=rss