Silhouette animation

Silhouette animation is animation in which the characters are only visible as black silhouettes. This is usually accomplished by backlighting articulated cardboard cut-outs, though other methods exist. It is partially inspired by, but for a number of reasons technically distinct from, shadow play.

Inspired by both European shadow play (ombres chinoises) and European silhouette cutting (Etienne de Silhouette and Johann Caspar Lavater), the medium of silhouette animation in film seems to have invented independently by several people at around the same time, the earliest known being the short subject The Sporting Mice (1909) by British filmmaker Charles Armstrong. The first to have survived is the same director's The Clown and His Donkey (1910). This, and at least one other of Armstrong's films (some stills of which have survived by being reproduced in a book by Georges Sadoul), is in white silhouette on a plain black background. It is, however, most likely that neither the German animator Lotte Reiniger nor the American puppeteer Tony Sarg knew of his work, and it was Reiniger who first established many of what are now the standard practices of the formant with her first film, Das Ornament des verliebten Herzens (The Ornament of the Enamoured Heart, 1919). Her feature film Die Geschichte des Prinzen Achmed (The Adventures of Prince Achmed, 1926) – one of the oldest of all animated features – coincided with a revival of interest in silhouettes and sparked off several imitators. Her influence is evident as far away as Japan, with Toshio Suzuki's Yonjunin no Tozoku (Forty Burglars, 1928), and as early as 1924, with Hidehiko Okuda, Tomu Uchida and Hakuzan Kimura's Kanimanji Engi (The Tale of Crab Temple).[1] A few silhouette films have also been produced by the National Film Board of Canada.[2]

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