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Silhouette animation
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Silhouette animation is animation in which the characters are only visible as black silhouettes.
The medium was invented through a combination of shadow play and silhouette cutting, but not, as is commonly thought, by the German animator Lotte Reiniger with her short film Das Ornament des verliebten Herzens (The Ornament of the Enamoured Heart, 1919). Rather, it was invented independently by several people at around the same time, the first known silhouette animation being British filmmaker Charles Armstrong's The Sporting Mice (1909). It is most likely that neither 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.. 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). A few silhouette films have also been produced by the National Film Board of Canada.
Today, pure silhouette films are very rare, and fewer still are animators who work primarily within its confines. However, sequences of silhouette animation can be seen, for example, in South Park when the lights are turned off, in an episode of Mona the Vampire (1999) and intermittently in the animation of Sayonara Zetsubo-Sensei (2007). To this date there have been only six feature-length silhouette films – Ugo Amadoro's Pinocchio (1930), Noburo Ofuji's Shaka no Shogai (1961) and two each by Lotte Reiniger and Michel Ocelot (though Ofuji's and both of Ocelot's are compilations of earlier work). The latter four of these are Doktor Dolittle und seine Tiere (Doctor Dolittle and His Animals, 1928), Princes et princesses (Princes and Princesses, 2000) and Bergères et dragons (Shepherdesses and Dragons), which, as of March 2008, is still in development.
TechniquesTraditional silhouette animation as invented by Reiniger is subdivision of cutout animation (itself one of the many forms of stop motion). It utilises figures cut out of black paper, reinforced with cardboard or thin metal sheets and tied together at their joints with thread or wire (usually substituted by plastic or metal paper fasteners in contemporary productions) which are then moved frame-by-frame on an animation stand and filmed top-down with a rostrum camera – such techniques were used, albeit with stylistic changes, by such practitioners as Noburo Ofuji in the 1940s and Bruno J. Böttge in the 1970s. Michel Ocelot's TV series Ciné si (Cinema If, 1989) was a little different, combining cutouts and cels and also, more occasionally, live action and claymation (this series is better known as Princes et princesses, the feature film version mentioned above). This was also the first silhouette animation to successfully make characters appear to speak for themselves (traditionally, either intertitles or voice-over narration had been used) as the mixed medium made accurate lip syncing possible. Traditional animation can also be used to imitate silhouette animation, as seen regularly in Be-PaPas' Shojo Kakumei Utena (Revolutionary Girl Utena, 1997).
Most recently, several CGI silhouette films have been made, which demonstrate different approaches to the technique – Jossie Malis' use already 2D, vector animation, Michel Ocelot's "Earth Intruders" (2007) and a scene in Azur et Asmar (Azur & Asmar, 2006) use 3D figures rendered as silhouettes, while Anthony Lucas' Academy Award-nominated The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello (2005) mixes 2D characters and 3D backgrounds, both of which are combination of live action and CGI. Computer animation has also been used to make more explicit reference
to shadow theatre – particularly of the Southeast Asian wayang kulit style – by adding visible rods to the characters which appear to be operating them (ironically, in CGI, it is the other way round). This was used in Jan Koester's Our Man in Nirvana (2006) and the opening of the Disney feature The Jungle Book 2 (2003).
However, traditional, cutout silhouette animation is still practised to this day by such people as Edward S. de Leon and Reza Ben Gajra, where it is often combined with other forms of stop motion animation such as Lumage.
Use of colourSilhouette films are traditionally monochrome, with the foreground solid black and the background being various shades of grey – the more distant an elements in intended to be, the paler the shade of grey, thus creating an illusion of depth. In Die Geschichte des Prinzen Achmed, different scenes were tinted in different all-over colours, as was the standard practice among features of the time. Das Geheimnis der Marquisin (The Marquise's Secret, 1922) is a reversed, white-on-black silhouette film, as is Ocelot's Les Trois inventeurs (The Three Inventors, 1979). Jack and the Beanstalk (1955), which Reiniger was forced to shoot in colour, uses full-colour backgrounds with the black silhouettes, some of which are inlaid with translucent, coloured, "sweet wrapper" material for a stained glass effect. Though she seems to have made the most of this expanded format, she disapproved if it herself and went back to monochrome films for most of her remaining career, perhaps finding an acceptable middle ground with Aucassin et Nicolette (Aucassin and Nicolette, 1976), which used a more restrained colour palette for its backgrounds.
Among other, later filmmakers, the dominant method of shooting silhouette films in colour has been to imitate the tinted look of Prinzen Achmed by using backgrounds with many different tones of one colour, or sometimes two close or complementary colours. Full-colour cutout animation in which the characters are mainly seen in profile is sometimes described as colour silhouette film, though this is dependent on one's definition of a silhouette, as opposed to profile or side-on viewpoints in general.
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