Silhouette animation is a cut out animation that tells a story by creating the characters made of either cut outs of black paper or silhouette cardboard with a while backdrop, or it can be a white silhouette with a black backdrop. This animation is mainly in black and white so it’s a lot easier to see. It was inspired by Chinese shadow play.
It’s similar to shadow puppets but shadow puppets use sticks to control the puppets, for silhouette animation they use the silhouette on a light ray box and take each frames using a rostum camera. Every time they take each frames they have to move the silhouette to create an animation.
For the silhouettes to move, they have to cut out different body parts and make small holes in irrelevant part, then they attach it. For example, A separate cut out of a head and a body have small holes and they are joint together with small wire hinges and its tied in the two separate holes so that the head and the body can move.
Silhouette animation is part of the traditional animation, this process was used for most movies from the 20th century. Before Walt Disney’s first animated movie ‘Snow White and the seven dwarfs’ in 1937, the silhouette animation was already invented.
Lotte Reiniger was a german animator who had always been fascinated on the Chinese shadow puppets. She invented the technique of cutting out cardboard to create an animation frame by frame. One of the popular films she made was ‘The Adventures of Prince Achemed’ which was based on the story of 1001 Arabian Nights.
My favourtie silhouette animation is ‘The Tale of the Three Brothers’ which was in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows 1.
The Tale of the Three Brothers is a fairy tale told to wizard children. It was written by Beedle the Bard, it was published as part of a series of works that collectively are called The Tales of Beedle the Bard.
It was originally called the ‘The Peverell brothers’ Antioch, Cadmus, and Ignotus Peverell.
It’s my favourite animation mainly because of its story and the use of 3D silhouette makes it very interesting and unique.
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