[nggallery id=35 template=galleryview]Born in Berlin-Charlottenburg in 1899. Lotte Reiniger fell in love with cinema as a teenager. In 1915 Reiniger  started making silhouette portraits of the various actors around her in the theater company. In 1918 Reiniger animated wooden rats for Wegener’s “The Pied Piper of Hamelin”. The success of this work got her admitted into Institute for Cultural Discovery, an experimental animation studio. It was here that she met her future creative partner and husband Carl Koch. In 1919 she directed “The Ornament of the Enamoured Heart”and went on to make six short films over the next few years, all produced and photographed by her husband. In 1923  she directed the The Adventures of Prince Achmed, completed in 1926, the oldest surviving animated feature film, with a plot that is a pastiche of stories from the Thousand and One Nights. Reiniger anticipated  Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks by a decade by devising the first multi-plane camera for certain effects. In 1928 se directed  Doctor Dolittle and His Animals, based on the first of the English children’s books by Hugh Lofting and  one year later “The Pursuit of Happiness”. Despite the war, Reiner and Koch made twelve films during this period, the best-known being Carmen 1933, and Papageno, 1935. When World War II started, they were forced to stay in Berlin. In 1949  Reiniger and Koch were finally able to move to London. where they opened Primrose Productions where Lotte Reiniger continued on making twenty animated silhouette films.