Week 1 Blog Post (Hansel and Gretel)

For this blog I chose to write about Lotte Reiniger's Hansel and Gretel. The story was told through narration and silhouette film animation. The silhouettes remind me of shadow puppets. The visual aspect of the film is shown in black and white with shadows.  Based on the Wikipedia article about Silhouette animation the technique for this form of animation is simple. It is a form of stop motion and consists of cardboard cutouts and backlighting. Wikipedia states that the cardboard cutouts have wires or thread that would put the joints together, so the cutouts can move, like the shadow puppets. The way silhouette animation is filmed is with a rostrum camera. The cutouts are being moved frame by frame to create the motions as seen in Hansel and Gretel. Once again using Wikipedia I discovered that a rostrum camera is a camera that has two parts, a lower part, where the cutouts can be placed and frame by frame shots can be taken from the top portion which is where the camera lies. Other techniques Reiniger used to tell the story is through transitions. She used fading to transition from credits to story and then story to ending credits. This helps create a smooth story. The narration for this animation is told in story form where the narrator reads the “once upon a time” parts and mimics the voices of the characters as well. There are also sound effects that depict animal noises for the goose and the squirrel. Along with sound effects the story is also told with music throughout the ten minute film. The music helps bring emotions and setting to the animation.

I feel that this form of animation is effective. It’s artistic and very broad. It is broad because the characters do not have specified faces and allows the viewers to have more imagination. Most importantly, the animation was able to tell the story seamlessly. It did not require high end technology to tell the story. This simple procedure is a great way to tell stories. However, I did find some points in the Hansel and Gretel animation, where the narration and the silhouette motions are not in sync. If the motions and narrations were in sync it would be perfect.