Cutout animation

• 1. Introduction

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  Cutout animation produced the world's first animated feature films, and those films are almost entirely lost. Italian-Argentine cartoonist Quirino Cristiani made El Apóstol in 1917, recognized as the first animated feature film ever made. He built it from flat figures cut from paper and card. Those prints no longer exist. The world's earliest surviving animated feature, Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed, was made the same way. Lotte Reiniger completed it in Germany in 1926.

  Flat characters, props, and backgrounds cut from paper, card, stiff fabric, or photographs form the basic vocabulary of the technique. They are moved frame by frame under a camera. The result resembles shadow play; stop motion replaces the live manipulation of flat puppets. What makes this technique so durable? And what does an animated feature made in Argentina in 1917 share with shadow puppets that predate cinema by centuries?

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• 2. The Shadow Theater Within

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  François Dominique Séraphin is not a name that appears in most animation histories, but Lotte Reiniger honored his work directly. In Jean Renoir's 1938 film La Marseillaise, Reiniger created a shadow play sequence as a tribute to him. Séraphin was a pioneer of the ombres chinoises, the French shadow theater tradition.

  The Indonesian wayang tradition had used flat puppets with movable joints for many centuries before cinema existed. The French ombres chinoises were especially popular in the 18th and 19th centuries and worked from the same mechanical principle. When cutout figures are built with joints made from rivets or pins, the connections produce a fixed, specific range of motion. That constraint is a design feature inherited from centuries of stage shadow work.

  Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed carries this shadow heritage visibly. Its backgrounds were composed of blown sand, painted material, and even soap, producing textures no standard animation cel could match. The subgenre of silhouette animation is most closely related to these shadow show ancestors. Reiniger had been making silhouette film sequences since 1917, contributing to Die Schöne Prinzessin von China. She continued producing silhouette shorts through the 1920s, including Das Ornament des Verliebten Herzens (1919) and Dornröschen (1922). From 1938 to 1982, she worked and lived in the United Kingdom.

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• 3. Japan Before Cel

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  Before 1934, Japanese animation relied almost entirely on cutout techniques. The reason was economic: celluloid was too expensive. Noboru Ofuji was the leading Japanese practitioner of the form, working primarily in cutout animation for most of his career.

  Ofuji's 1926 film Burglars of Baghdad Castle used chiyogami, the colored decorative paper of Japanese craft tradition. The material gave his films a visual texture quite different from the silhouette work being produced in Europe that decade. When celluloid became accessible, cel animation replaced cutout across Japan. Ofuji's career in cutout animation represented the form's most sustained Japanese expression.

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• 4. The Collage Tradition

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  Terry Gilliam's animations for Monty Python's Flying Circus ran from 1969 to 1975. They were built from ready-made imagery rather than purpose-built figures. Gilliam drew on existing printed sources, repositioning images in a collage style that felt deliberately jarring. The method distinguished his work sharply from the handcrafted silhouette puppets of earlier cutout animation.

  Reiniger's films and others in her tradition used backlit animation, with the light source placed below the artwork, creating a glowing silhouette effect. Gilliam worked with light coming from above, which gives his figures a flat, opaque quality very different from backlit work. His 1974 short The Miracle of Flight also used these cutout techniques.

  Harry Everett Smith's No. 12, also known as Heaven and Earth Magic, was completed in 1962. Smith culled cut-out illustrations from 19th century catalogs and assembled them into a feature-length film. The photomontage approach Gilliam developed for television and Smith brought to experimental cinema had an obvious next stage. Music video directors in the following decade would take it to its widest popular audience.

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• 5. Music Video Canvas

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  Jim Blashfield brought the collage approach to mainstream popular music, beginning with his 1985 video for Talking Heads' "And She Was." He followed it with Paul Simon's "Boy in the Bubble." He also made Tears for Fears' "Sowing the Seeds of Love" in 1989, which won two MTV Awards. Michael Jackson's "Leave Me Alone," also made by Blashfield in 1989, won a Grammy Award, a Cannes Golden Lion, and an MTV Award.

  Röyksopp's "Eple" in 2003 took the technique in a formally distinct direction. The video used a specific kind of cutout animation that continuously zoomed out and panned through old still pictures, seamlessly combined. This is a variation of the Ken Burns effect, a technique used in documentary films to add motion to still photographs. In "Eple," it became the primary visual language rather than a secondary device.

  Redbone's "Come and Get Your Love," Serj Tankian's "Lie Lie Lie" in 2007, and B.o.B's "Nothing on You" in 2009 all used cutout animation. Skindred's "Pressure" in 2006 was among them. The flat-figure approach that became visible in music video was not new. Television had been using variations of it since the late 1950s.

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• 6. Television's Reach

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  John Ryan's Captain Pugwash first aired in 1957 and ran through 1966, returning again from 1974 to 1975. Ryan used cardboard cutouts manipulated with levers in front of painted backgrounds, filming in real time rather than frame by frame. The illusion worked within the tolerances of early broadcast television.

  Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin, working together as Smallfilms, built an animation system for their series that relied on magnets placed on cutouts. Moving those magnets moved the figures, and the system was designed to work during live broadcasting. Their series Alexander the Mouse ran from 1957 to 1958. Ivor the Engine first appeared in 1959, and Noggin the Nog ran from 1959 to 1965. All three returned for later runs, with Noggin the Nog continuing into 1982.

  Charlie and Lola, based on Lauren Child's work, ran from 2005 to 2008. It mashed together 2D Flash animation, paper cutout, fabric design, real textures, photomontage, and archive footage in a deliberately layered visual style. Angela Anaconda ran from 1999 to 2002. It used black-and-white photographs of real faces superimposed on computer-generated bodies and backgrounds. South Park began in 1997 using construction paper cutouts before switching to computer software. Its visual style was always intended to keep the look of paper.

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• 7. Paper Goes Digital

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  Twice Upon a Time was directed by John Korty and produced by George Lucas in 1983. The filmmakers called their technique Lumage. It involved prefabricated cut-out plastic pieces moved on a light table, replacing hand-cut paper with manufactured components.

  South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut in 1999 used computer animation to replicate the cutout look. Imaginationland: The Movie in 2008 did the same. The Breadwinner in 2017 used digital animation to imitate cutout style specifically in its storyworld sequences. René Laloux's La Planète sauvage (Fantastic Planet) from 1973 represents the opposite approach. It is unarmatured cutout animation at the feature level, with no joints or mechanical assists.

  Nintendo's Paper Mario series has run since 2000, using cutout characters to explore the Mushroom Kingdom. The 2012 commercial for Paper Mario: Sticker Star also used cutout animation. JibJab built an online humor site primarily from cutout animation made from photographs. Hallmark Cards' Hoops and Yoyo have appeared in E-cards and cutout-animated cartoons since 2003. Sega's Sonic 4: Episode I and II used cutout animation for their opening logos. The sequences rendered Sonic and Tails as sprite characters derived from 3D models.

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