The Stories of Lotte Reiniger

The final session in this Moon Projector season contemplates the feeling around the first experience of cinema — cinema as revelation, magic, fantasy and mystery from the first gaze, from the first contact with the medium, and imagery etched on the retina of childhood. The programme shows Émile Cohl’s landmark Fantasmagorie (1908), the first ever hand-drawn animation, and Ignacio Agüero’s Cien niños esperando un tren (One Hundred Children Waiting for a Train, 1988), a feature-length film on play and the origins of cinema.   

Fantasmagorie (1908)by Émile Cohl (Paris, 1857– Villejuif, 1938) is the first expression in the history of animated drawing. Émile Cohl was an illustrator who belonged to the Parisian art group Arts incohérents (1882–1895), who was bestowed with an absurdist and pre-Surrealist talent. Whereas the Lumière brothers were able get audiences out of their seats as they witnessed a train moving towards them in 1895, Fantasmagorie is a supernatural experience, akin to an apparition yet also innocuous and entertaining — the inanimate comes to life out of nothing and figures seemingly move with little sense. From the outset, animation was related to caricature, fabulation and the comical, a sweet spot for the dreams of the youngest audience.    

From the discovery of new imagery arising from the animated line to knowledge of the world through a screen, Cien niños esperando un tren (1988), by Chilean director Ignacio Agüero (Santiago, 1952), narrates a group of young people’s discovery of cinema in a workshop on the origins of the medium in a poverty-stricken town on the outskirts of Santiago de Chile. Play, fun and learning combine with a fascination with images, as viewing Émile Cohl’s Fantasmagorie (1908) in the workshop becomes an act of freedom. 

Moon Projector is the Museo Reina Sofía’s regular film programme for young audiences. Every Sunday morning, sessions are held to introduce children to cinema and audiovisual arts, taking them on a journey of fascination, where imagination and knowledge abound, from the dawn of film language to today’s most creative and original works with future generations in mind. The programme title draws from the work of poet Federico García Lorca, a Moon Projector where dreams and early imagination reverberate, and where children’s fantasy emerges from the contemplation of projected light.   

This inaugural session takes us back to the beginning. The Adventures of Prince Achmed is the first ever feature-length animation film, made using the silhouette animation technique and shadow puppetry, and tells a story from One Thousand and One Nights. Achmed, his father the Caliph, his sister Dinarsade and an evil sorcerer are the characters in this first great story. The young prince objects to his sister being handed over to a treacherous sorcerer who has put a price on a magic flying horse. In his eagerness, the prince is deceived by the wizard, who makes him mount the horse, taking him to an unknown and faraway place. The film reveals, for the first time, colour and forms in a fantastical story — an aesthetic explosion with the capacity for unique and dreamy fascination.      

Lotte Reiniger (Germany, 1899–1981) is regarded as the pioneer of animation film. Inspired by the films of Georges Méliès, German Expressionism and pre-cinema inventions, Reiniger conceived of her own universe based on storytelling tradition, the genesis of narrative animation. Drawing from popular children’s puppetry theatre and shadow play, she built animated stories with silhouettes and shadows which would later evolve into experimentation with colour.    

This screening unveils the Museo’s new cinema theatre, a renovated cinematic space, after a year of remodelling work, which holds a set Thursday-to-Sunday programme with an array of audiences and gazes in mind.

Colours! is the second instalment of the children’s film series Moon Projector, screening, under a conceptual chromatic arc, short animation and documentary films for all ages. This session shines a light on film-makers from a range of time periods, for example Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami; more contemporary figures like French artist and film-maker Alain Biet; young animation directors such as German artist Franka Sachse, Lithuanian director Ignas Meilunas; and Swiss illustrator and animator Oona Lacroix. Congregated here, they form an all-encompassing, colour-based experience from knowledge, plays with light, graphic stories, illustration and humour.

Rangha (The Colours) is a short film Kiarostami made for the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults — known as Kanoon, and highly active in the 1960s and 1970s in Iran — which explores the theme of colour from an educational vision and its manifestation in the everyday of childhood. A knowledge-based aesthetic representation with echoes of daily life. Alain Biet’s Grands Canons (Perfect Copies) is a symphony of paper illustrations of daily objects which come to life with plays of colour. In Saka sy Vorona (Cat and Bird), Franka Sachse seems to make colours disappear, despite only using one: on a white background the silhouette of a black cat appears and discovers a small white bird emerging from the darkness, an encounter that creates a play of possible forms and silhouettes. In Mr. Night Has a Day Off, Mister Night is in charge of day becoming night, but one fine day he decides to visit the city in the morning, much to his dismay. Drawing from a simple idea and a fun character, animator Ignas Meilunas reveals the secret of colours to us: light. Finally, in Coucouleurs, Oona Lacroix recounts the lives of different birds that nest in trees sharing their same colour. But what happens when a bird has more than one colour? 

Moon Projector is the Museo Reina Sofía’s regular film programme for young audiences. Every Sunday morning, sessions are held to introduce children to cinema and audiovisual arts, taking them on a journey of fascination, where imagination and knowledge abound, from the dawn of film language to today’s most creative and original works with future generations in mind. The programme title draws from the work of poet Federico García Lorca, a Moon Projector where dreams and early imagination reverberate, and where children’s fantasy emerges from the contemplation of projected light.   

Following a showing of The Adventures of Prince Achmed, the oldest feature-length animation film preserved, this edition of Moon Projector shows some of the animated short films Lotte Reiniger made with inspiration from European tradition: the Brothers Grimm’s Cinderella and Hansel and Gretel, Hans Christian Andersen’s Thumbelina and Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont’s The Three Wishes. Under the wing of the German film-maker, this children’s literary heritage, which germinated in Romanticism, takes on a new aesthetic and artistic meaning, her unique style of frame-by-frame silhouettes evolving in this ensemble of past animations with an original stage design and a new narrative rhythm from entertaining artistic expressions and musical pieces.    

Lotte Reiniger (Germany, 1899–1981) is regarded as the pioneer of animation film. Inspired by the films of Georges Méliès, German Expressionism and pre-cinema inventions, Reiniger conceived of her own universe based on storytelling tradition, the genesis of narrative animation.    

Pivotally, one aspect of the film-maker’s work was the prolific creation of animation films based on European cultural heritage, where she gathered the tales of the continent’s great fable storytellers. The majority of these animated black-and-white pieces were made for the BBC in the UK, where Reiniger lived from 1949 onwards after fleeing the spread of Nazism in Germany and following spells in different European countries.

Les Maîtres du temps (The Time Masters) is the second feature-length film by the master of fantastical animation, René Laloux (Paris, 1929 – Angoulême, 2004), on this occasion with the collaboration of the great illustrator and cartoonist Jean Giraud (Nogent-sur-Marne, 1938 – Paris, 2012), known internationally as Mœbius. Laloux and Mœbius, along with esteemed Hungarian film-maker Tibor Hernádi (Budapest, 1947–2012) as animation director, made one of the most iconic works in sci-fi animation, despite its relative obscurity for many audiences. The story is based on the novel L'Orphelin de Perdide (1958) by French writer Stefan Wul, a source of creative inspiration for the metaphysical world of René Laloux.   

The film, suitable for all ages, recreates the unique atmosphere of Mœbius’s graphic world and Laloux’s philosophical script, which manages to reach the youngest audiences via Piel, a roaming boy marooned on the planet of Perdide. With a comic-book graphic style and psychodelia, fantastical spaceships, cosmic landscapes, robot-humanoids and galactic beings all appear on screen to Mœbius’s unmistakeable aesthetic. The rescue of young Piel, by picking up a transmitter call from the adventurer Jaffar, takes us on a journey into a surreal and hypnotic future world with a seemingly linear narration. The film is a fantastical voyage into the meaning of childhood and the passage of time.

Moon Projector is the Museo Reina Sofía’s regular film programme for young audiences. Every Sunday morning, sessions are held to introduce children to cinema and audiovisual arts, taking them on a journey of fascination, where imagination and knowledge abound, from the dawn of film language to today’s most creative and original works with future generations in mind. The programme title draws from the work of poet Federico García Lorca, a Moon Projector where dreams and early imagination reverberate, and where children’s fantasy emerges from the contemplation of projected light.

Dancing Forms takes us into the genesis of animation, into the fascinating worlds of early footage of moving forms and colour in film. These principles denoted the first filmic experience of animated cinema, in this case through the basic forms of art that inspired experimental creation, as well as an approach to primitive imagery. This visual and sound experience seeks to explore the sensory world of child contemplation — a journey of forms, colours, sound and different music which spark children’s curious gaze. A new world without identity figures or predictable narratives, where the youngest children can directly experience moving forms and colours.

The artists and film-makers who accompany us on this voyage include some of the pioneers from the historical avant-garde and key artists in the mid-twentieth century. The session is structured around Oskar Fischinger (Germany,1900 – USA,1967), one of the grand masters of animation by way of the experimental montage of sounds and images; Len Lye (New Zealand, 1901 – USA, 1980), a reference point in experimental animation in the first half of the twentieth century via the innovative fusion of sounds, such as Latin rhythms, mambo and swing, and abstract forms; Mary Ellen Bute (USA,1906–1983), one of the first women experimental film-makers with a work which pivots around synaesthesia, music turned into images; Norman McLaren (Scotland, 1914 – Canada, 1987), undoubtedly one of the most relevant artists in the creation of graphic-sound animations; and finally Faith Hubley (New York, 1924–2001), an artist behind evocative abstract films that evolved from primitive forms to narrative figuration.

Moon Projector returns in 2026 with the grandmaster of Czech animation, Karel Zeman (Ostroměř, 1910 – Prague, 1989), an iconic film-maker in the history of fantasy cinema. 

The visual world of Karel Zeman encompasses an array of influences, from the imagery of Jules Verne and his provocative vision of the future to the dream-like, romantic aesthetic of illustrator Gustave Doré — palpable in Zeman’s scenes with an Orientalist and exotic flavour — not to mention the creative solutions of Georges Méliès. Zeman’s imagination led him not only to invent but also construct from a craftsman’s resources, and from this world came creations of identity such as the short film Inspiration (1948) and his first feature-length film King Lavra (1950), establishing him as a probing, revolutionary artist. From his first productions with puppets and the use of stop-motion, his style would evolve with the use of animated drawing and his interaction with classical fiction. Works such as The Treasure of Bird Island (1952), Journey to the Beginning of Time (1955), The Fabulous Baron (1961), The Stolen Airship (1967) and his final feature film The Tale of John and Mary (1980) combine to make Karel Zeman one of the twentieth century’s most relevant film artists. Such a legacy is discernible in the work of numerous directors — the creatures of Ray Harryhaussen, the puppets of Tadanari Okamoto, childhood as a free space in the work of Hayao Miyazaki, the animated illustrations of Terry Gilliam, the fantasy of Tim Burton and even the offbeat world of Wes Anderson.

In a war, where does hope live? Beyond the Wall… The Beach! envisions a better world through the eyes of children in Palestine. A vision which is explored in this programme via a selection of films — fiction and animation — from this war-torn country. From an adult’s point of view, war is justified on political and moral grounds. Through a child’s eyes, however, any logic of war’s brutality is demolished and their perspective shows the tragedy of war as a mistake without justification. Faced with adult destruction, children reaffirm life in its fullness.     

The line-up of film-makers of Palestinian origin to feature here — Ibrahim Handal, Tariq Rimawi, Firas Khoury, Rami Abbas, Nisreen Yaseen and Haneen Koraz — are a case in point. Ibrahim Handal stands as one of the emerging voices among young Palestinian film-makers, his practice focusing on daily life, identity and resistance with a body of work which, although rooted in reality, plays with creative documentary and fiction. Firas Khoury, meanwhile, is a renowned Palestinian director whose work has come to express what normal life would be like for children in Palestine, showing the reality facing any child. Both film-makers remove the veil of prejudice as they make the life of Palestinian children equal to the life of children in any peaceful country.   

The introduction to the series features Rami Abbas, a Palestinian-born film-maker who studied in Syria and currently lives in Madrid. His work is a further example of diaspora and of memory and resistance. Hide & Seek (2024) reflects this side of exodus and, in relation to this experience, protection of the most vulnerable.  

Nisreen Yaseen, for her part, imparts a vision of the transition from childhood to adolescence, in which the noise of war is dissolved, while Tariq Rimawi’s award-winning animated short film Zoo (2022) is an aesthetic work of profound symbolic importance which expounds the opposition between oppression and freedom. 

Finally, Haneen Koraz, who has made her entire body of work from refugee camps on the Gaza Strip, giving voice, through animation workshops, to minors, mothers and families. A Day in the Tent (2024) is a filmic show of resilience and truth that allows the Gaza people to tell the world what it means to live under bombs. Only through a child’s eye, and drawings, can this reality without prejudice be shown.