Short answers, pulled from the story.
The first known silhouette animation film is The Sporting Mice, which appeared in 1909. This film marked the beginning of the medium before it remained a forgotten footnote for decades until Lotte Reiniger transformed it into high art.
Lotte Reiniger engineered a complex system of articulated joints using thread and wire to create figures that could breathe, walk, and dance. Her technique involved layering multiple cutouts on a glass plate, backlighting them with a single light source, and filming the movement frame by frame with a rostrum camera.
Lotte Reiniger released The Adventures of Prince Achmed in 1926, and the project involved over 200,000 individual cutouts. The film took three years to complete and required Reiniger and her team to work in shifts, often staying up all night to meet deadlines.
Toshio Suzuki created Forty Burglars in 1928, while Hidehiko Okuda, Tomu Uchida, and Hakuzan Kimura produced The Tale of Crab Temple in 1924. These films demonstrated that the medium could be adapted to different cultural contexts and storytelling traditions.
Lotte Reiniger used tinting in The Adventures of Prince Achmed to distinguish different scenes, but she ultimately returned to monochrome films. She believed that the simplicity of black and white was more effective for storytelling, making the use of color a rare and experimental practice.
Modern animators use computer-generated imagery to create the illusion of traditional cutout animation while incorporating 3D elements to create a more dynamic visual experience. Films like The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello and Emesis Blue have used digital techniques to mimic the look of traditional silhouette animation.