Craft and Play in Lotte Reiniger’s Fairy Tale Films

Abstract

Although Lotte Reiniger’s films are both animated and often based on fairy tales, her films, perhaps surprisingly, are not often explicitly associated with children. This chapter seeks to interrogate the relationship, or lack thereof, between Reiniger and children’s culture, by focusing on a number of key areas. First, Reiniger is perhaps best known for her animated films based on fairy tales, and this chapter will seek to position Reiniger alongside, or within, a long-held societal and cultural association between fairy tales and children. Second, Reiniger’s films are animated, and despite being extremely wide-ranging and multifaceted, animation is often, like fairy tale, aligned with children’s culture. Finally, the chapter moves beyond these arguments to consider Reiniger and children’s films in relation to notions of craft and play. What sets Reiniger’s animation apart from most other animation associated with children is her method. Reiniger uses the time-consuming technique of silhouette paper cut-outs. Her method is a distinctly “crafty” one. Craft and play are self-evidently also associated with children’s culture in some cases and will provide a lens through which to examine the relationship between Reiniger’s films and/as children’s culture.