Animator Review

Lotte Reiniger

Fig.1

Lotte Reiniger is very well known for her silhouette animations and films. Her animation style is  based around paper-cut stop motion and uses this technique to tell fairy tales such as cinderella, Hansel and Gretel and The Adventures of Prince Achmed which was said to be the first ever feature-length animated film made. The stories she presents through her style of animating has been something that has heavily influenced her "her work was mostly inspired by antiquated traditions of performance and storytelling. -- Film was Reiniger’s passion: as a child she was delighted by the trick films of Georges Méliès, and later the dreamy horrors of Paul Wegener. She was also an enthusiast for the Chinese art of shadow puppetry, creating her own silhouette spectaculars for a parental audience. " (Hutchinson, 2016)

 Her process is carried out by designing the characters onto black card, each part of the character such as the torso, head, forearm and anything being animated is cut separately from each other, in other terms the more parts separated the more options you have when it comes to moving the character during the process of animating. To connect these parts together, areas are pierced so that they will be connected and support the role of moving the character around. Then, "metal" hinges are used to keep the parts connected and movable, creating the full body of the character and the ability to function it's poses. 

Fig.2

During the process of animating, The scene is set up by a light box, any background details is placed on top of this and a glass plate is then placed on top of that where the character and the foreground details will also be placed. It's sort of a traditional way of "Locking" Layers, you don't want to move the background during animating so using a glass plate to hold it down makes it less fiddly. Finally, with a lot of patience movement is created each time a photo is taken above, its a process of moving the character and taking the photo each time and becomes repetetive.

Overall, Lotte's style of animation is painfully charming, her characterisation in silhouette animating makes it easy so identify characters, she animates on a flat perspective and yet, she is still able to make her characters actions effective. Her style of animation shows how a simple technique can have a huge affect when it comes to narrative animating.

Don Hertzfeldt

Fig 3

Hertzfeldt's style is admirably simple, using simple stick figure like characters to help convey his odd yet humorous style of narrative, and that's what makes his work so fascinating. "Don Hertzfeldt projects the complex psychologies of his characters through minute enhancements of facial features. Yet he hasn't given himself much creative wriggle room, as the stars of his movies are all near-featureless stick men with dots for eyes and a single line for a mouth." (Jenkins 2013) One thing to be noted about his style of animating, he uses boiling, an animating technique where you draw over the same frame twice during animating and it adds this sort of wiggling effect, so it basically gives the animation movement when the frames are idle.

One thing to admire about one of his animations Billy's Balloon is the innocent yet still quite violent actions going on, though it's made to seem quite light since the balloon attacking billy is not so harmful so you hear these rubbery sounds when billy is hit by the balloon making it seem more comedic while still being very violent. The entirety of the animation itself doesnt have much context apart from balloons beating up children but i think that's what Hertzfeldt communicates that, through the simplicity of style and vague context you can still make an effective animation

Illustration:
Fig 1 [Screenshot] : http://www.bfi.org.uk/education-research/education/gothic-classroom/hansel-gretel-1955
Fig 2 [Screenshot] : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvU55CUw5Ck @ 4:00
Fig 3 [Screenshot] : https://www.directorslibrary.com/director/don-hertzfeldt/

Bibliography:
Hutchinson, 2016 - https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/jun/02/lotte-reiniger-the-pioneer-of-silhouette-animation-google-doodle [Accessed Oct. 12 2017]
Jenkins 2013 - https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2013/may/02/don-hertzfeldt-animator-beautiful-day [Accessed Oct. 12 2017]