Charlotte Reiniger is the work of a German female director and a pioneer of paper-cut animation. This feature-length paper-cut animation film shot in 1926 is not only recognized as a classic in the field of paper-cut animation, but historians believe that this work is the real one. The first animated feature film in the sense. Although this point of view still needs to be demonstrated, the film is undoubtedly the first animated feature film in Europe.
The film is adapted from "One Thousand and One Nights", full of adventure, romance and magic. The film not only uses Charlotte Reiniger's freely-handled medium, paper-cutting, but also boldly attempts to use wax and sand to make animations. This black-and-white film (18 frames per second) uses manual coloring technology to pursue the multi-angle change of the camera. Charlotte Reiniger created all the characters and personally produced each silhouette. She uses hand-made scissors to cut out the character, and uses thread as a hinge to connect the various body parts of the character. When shooting, the character is placed on a glass table, the light is projected from below, and the camera shoots from above. The positions of the characters in each exposure frame are only slightly changed, thus connecting them into a series of complete actions. Between 1923 and 1926, the film took about 250,000 photos on the animation stage, of which about 96,000 were finally adopted.
The film was shot on 35mm film and lasted 65 minutes. The film is a typical silent film on the eve of the birth of a sound film, with German subtitles inserted between each paragraph to explain the plot.
Also involved in the production of the film are Charlotte Reiniger's husband Carl Koch, Berthold Bartosch, and Waiter Ruttmann, who is in charge of the background design. When the film was released in 1926, it was praised by film masters including Jean Renoir and Rene Claire. Jean Renoir later became a close friend and work partner of Charlotte Reiniger.
