Silhouettes animation

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Silhouette animation is a type of animation in which the characters are only visible as black silhouettes . This effect is usually created using backlighting and cardboard figures , although other methods exist as well. This method is inspired by the shadow play , but there are clear differences in terms of the technical implementation.

history

Inspired by the European shadow play and the European silhouette ( Étienne de Silhouette and Johann Caspar Lavater ), the silhouette animation in films was invented apparently in parallel but independently of one another by different people. The earliest known use is in the short film The Sporting Mice (1909) by British filmmaker Charles Armstrong. His film The Clown and His Donkey (1910) is the earliest surviving silhouette animation film. In this and at least one of Armstrong's other films (some of which lived on through books by Georges Sadoul ), white silhouettes on a black background were used.

However, it is very likely that neither the German animator Lotte Reiniger nor the American puppeteer Tony Sarg knew about Armstrong's work. Reiniger created some of today's standard processes with her first film The Ornament of the Heart in Love (1919). Her 1926 feature film The Adventures of Prince Achmed - one of the oldest animated feature films - generated interest in silhouettes and led to some imitators. Reiniger's influence obviously reached as far as Japan , because Toshio Suzuki's Yonjunin no Tozoku ("Forty Robbers", 1928) and Hidehiko Okuda , Tomu Uchida and Hakuzan Kimura's Kanimanji Engi ("The Tale of the Temple of the Crabs") are inspired by their work.

Some silhouette films have also been produced by the National Film Board of Canada .

Between 1954 and 1990, more than 70 silhouette animation films were produced in the DEFA studio for animated films in Dresden . Most of these films are fairy tales, fables and children's stories, but some educational and propaganda films have also been made. Well-known directors of this time are Bruno J. Böttge , Manfred Henke and Jörg Herrmann . Along with Lotte Reiniger, Bruno J. Böttge was one of the most consistent silhouette filmmakers in animation film history with around 40 films.

Nowadays the professional production of pure silhouette films is rare and animators who specialize exclusively in this area are even rarer. Sequences of digital and drawn silhouette animations are still used, for example in South Park when the light is switched off, in an episode of the series Mona the Vampire (1999) and at times in the animation Sayonara Zetsubō Sensei (2007), as well as in some levels in Donkey Kong Country Returns (2010).

techniques

Traditional silhouette animation, as invented by Reiniger, is a sub-category of cut-out animation (also known as paper cutting ), which is one of the many forms of stop motion . This technique uses figures that are cut out of cardboard and, in some cases, then reinforced with thin metal plates. These figures are tied together at the joints with thread or wire (nowadays, plastic or metal sample clips are mostly used instead ). The joints are then moved frame by frame on a trick table and filmed from above with a rostrum camera . Such techniques were used with stylistic changes by professionals such as Noburō Ōfuji in the 1940s and Bruno J. Böttge in the 1970s. Michel Ocelot's television series Ciné si (1989) used a slightly different technique in which cut-out animation is combined with cels and occasionally real film or clay animation (this series is better known as Princes et princesses , the feature film version mentioned below).

This was also the first silhouette animation that successfully let the characters speak for themselves (traditionally either subtitles or voice-over narration were used), as the combination of different techniques made correct lip synchronization possible.

Traditional animation can also be used to imitate silhouette animation, as is regularly done in Be-PaPas ' Utena. Revolutionary Girl (1997).

Finally, some silhouette films from the field of computer animation were produced, which shows the different approaches to this technique. Jossie Malis, for example, uses 2D vector animation , Michel Ocelot uses 3D figures in his film Earth Intruders (2007) and a scene by Azur and Asmar (2006), which are rendered as silhouettes , and Anthony Lucas uses them in his Oscar- nominated film The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello (2005) 2D figures combined with 3D backgrounds.

Computer animation was also used to make more explicit reference to shadow theater, in particular to that of the Southeast Asian " Wayang cult", by visibly adding rods that appear to move the characters (ironically, in computer graphics, it's the other way around). This technique was used, for example, in Jan Koester's Our Man in Nirvana (2006) and at the beginning of Disney's feature film The Jungle Book 2 (2003). Michel Ocelot's television series Bergères et dragons ( Shepherdesses and Dragons , 2010) uses a mixture of 2D and 3D computer animation to simulate the impression of his earlier analog silhouette animations.

However, traditional cut-out silhouette animation is still practiced by people like Edward D. de Leon and Reza Ben Gajra , often combined with other forms of stop-motion animation, such as Lumage , which uses a cut Representing out technique with pieces of plastic and a light table.

Silhouette films are traditionally monochrome , using solid black for the foreground and various shades of gray for the background - the more distant an element is supposed to appear, the paler its shade of gray is chosen to create an illusion of depth . In The Story of Prince Achmed , various scenes as a whole were viraged in different colors , as was the standard procedure for feature films at the time. The Secret of the Marquisess (1922) is a white-on-black silhouette film. Jack and the Beanstalk ("Hans und die Bohnenranke", 1955), which Reinger had to turn in color, uses colors for the background and black silhouettes, some of which are wrapped in transparent colored paper to achieve a stained glass effect. For the rest of her career, however, Reiniger turned back to monochrome films. However, Reiniger struck a middle ground with her film Aucassin et Nicolette ( Aucassin and Nicolette , 1976), in which a more subtle color palette was chosen for the backgrounds, which were made from pieces of transparent plastic .

Many later filmmakers tried to imitate the toned style of The Adventures of Prince Ahmed in their colored silhouette films by using backgrounds with many different tones of one color, or with two similar or complementary colors.

List of full-length silhouette films

Ōfuji's and Ocelot's feature films are compilation films from earlier short film series.

List of silhouette short films

literature

  • Margit Downar (arrangement): Lotte Reiniger: Silhouette film and shadow theater . For the exhibition of the Puppet Theater Museum in the Munich City Museum. Verlag Karl M. Lipp, Munich 1979, ISBN 3-87490-532-2
  • Ernst Biesalski : silhouette and silhouette. Little history of silhouette art . Callwey Verlag, Munich 1964.
  • Richard Williams: The Animator's Survival Kit . ISBN 0-571-20228-4
  • Harold Whitaker, John Halas: Timing for Animation . ISBN 0-240-51714-8

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Pierre Jouvanceau: The silhouette film , trans. Kitson (= Pagine di Chiavari), Le Mani, Genoa 2004, ISBN 88-8012-299-1 .
  2. ↑ Jayne Pilling: The storyteller . In: 2D and Beyond  (= animation). RotoVision, Hove 2001, ISBN 2-88046-445-5 , pp. 100-109, 153.
  3. ↑ aniboom.com about Jossie Malis ( memento of the original from July 14, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.aniboom.com
  4. ↑ Raganelli, Katja (Director). (1999). Lotte Reiniger: Homage to the Inventor of the Silhouette Film  [Documentary]. British Film Institute .