Harlekin

Here is a typically graceful and beautiful example of Lotte Reiniger's silhouette animation, a ballet of two lovers to baroque music. I don't have a word to say against it; Miss Reiniger's work lives up to her impossibly high standard. Yet there's the numeric rating of the IMDb and here's a review in which I must say something, so here we are. As I've noted elsewhere, all reviews are subjective, a matter of the reviewer's taste and writing ability rather than the artist's. So this review will be about my taste, and I hope you can glean from it some sense of whether you agree or disagree and more importantly why.

First, the baroque music. It's all very skillful. Yet there is something slow and dull. Polyphony was still a big deal during Baroque's heyday, and concessions had to be made to the audience's ability to follow what was going on. Because the images match themselves to the music, this produces a sense of much ado about nothing offered as a great matter. Given the great length of this piece Miss Reiniger's longest since the dazzling and varied fantasy of THE ADVENTURES OF PRINCE ACHMED, it shows vey poorly.

Yet there is no sense in my mind that this is a lesser work. It's merely one that does not appeal to me particularly. How do you feel about it?

Harlekin (1931)

*** (out of 4)

This twenty-five minute animation film from director Lotte Reiniger is certainly a real treat for the eyes. The animation is done via silhouette and the use of stop-motion and the story is about lover who meet, fall in love, struggle and we see their love blossom over a period of struggles. I'm not going to spoil what happens in the movie but I must say that I was quite shocked to see how well-detailed the actual plot was. With that said, there's no question that the main reason to watch this is for the wonderful look of the picture. I've seen a lot of silhouette films and I must say that most of them are hard to connect to but that's certainly not the case here. Reiniger manages to pull you directly into the story as well as make you feel for the characters. It really does seem and feel as if you're watching real characters and that's quite an achievement.