Lotte’s Magical Paper Puppets: The Woman Behind the First Animated Feature Film (2020) is an interesting but uneven picture book.
Written by Brooke Hartman and illustrated by Kathryn Carr, it tells the story of Lotte Reiniger and her role in the development of animated films. Reiniger worked with papercutting, cutting small silhouettes from paper (linking some sections with wire), and Carr is quite a fine papercutter who creates new images that echo Reiniger’s. These images are striking and lovely, likely to engage both adult and child readers.
Reiniger’s story is important and needs to be told, but Hartman makes some choices about how to tell that story that don’t work as well as they might. The descriptions of Lotte’s character and emotions are clear. The discussion of the larger context, though, becomes poetic and opaque. Those pages talk about the rise of a threatening man “with twisted words” who “clenched his hand/And made demands.” However, since we don’t get a date, a country, or a name, I honestly wasn’t sure if this was a family figure, a nightmare for this dreamer, or a political figure. (The historical context at the end of the book identify the location as Germany, and the man as Hitler, but that’s not in the book itself.) I was lost, and suspect teachers and parents will be too.
