Reiniger (born on June 2, 1899) was the inventor of silhouette film and the author of the first feature-length animated film The Adventures of Prince Achmed (Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed, 1926), was made eleven years before Disney’s Snowwhite and the Seven Dwarfs, which is wrongly said to have been the first feature-length animated film.
Already in her childhood, she was thrilled by the Chinese technique of the theatre of shadows and films by Georges Méličs and Paul Wegener. Because of Wegener, in 1916 she joined Max Reinhardt’s theatre. Wegener noticed her talent and hired her as a silhouette maker for the introductory sequences in his films Apokalypse (1918) and The Pied Piper of Hamelin (Der Rattenfänger von Hameln, 1918). Lotte made her first film The Ornament of a Loving Heart (Das Ornament des verliebten Herzens) in 1919 and two years later she married Carl Koch who worked with her on that film. From 1920 to 1923, she made film fairy tales and commercials for Julius Pinschewer including Das Geheimnis der Marquise (1922). Soon, a German banker Louis Hagen invited Lotte and Carl Koch to be teachers to his children. Hagen financed Lotte’s most famous film, The Adventures of Prince Achmed (Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed, 1926). This animated film was inspired by the stories of 1001 nights and its production was started in 1923. Over the next three years she made about 300,000 frames. This film was first shown on September 23, 1926 in Berlin’s Marmorpalast film theater. Lotte used the new sound technique in her silhouette films based on musical motifs from Zehn Minuten Mozart (1930), Harlekin (1931), Carmen (1933) and Papageno (1935). She left Germany in 1936 and spent some time working in England, France and Italy. In 1944, she returned to Germany but left it again in 1949 to go to London. For several years she made commercials for the G.P.O. Company. In the 1950s she made a series of fairy-tale films for Primrose Productions, which was owned by Louis Hagen, the son of the banker who financed her film The Adventures of Prince Achmed. After her husband’s death in 1963, she worked with less intensity. She made several more films and wrote the book “Shadow Theatres and shadow-films”, worked on illustrations of Mozart’s operas and taught at the Goethe Institute. She spent some time in Canada where she made Aucassin und Nicolette (1975).