Multiplane camera

An early example is the scene in Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs where the Evil Queen drinks her potion, and the surroundings appear to spin around her.

An early form of the multiplane camera was developed by Lotte Reiniger and her husband Carl Koch, for her animated feature The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926).

[1] Reiniger had long experimented with Chinese shadow puppetry and its methods of suggesting depth by layering shallow, flat planes with colorful backgrounds and backlit action.

Her novel design, dating to 1923, used multiple layers of glass to create added depth in the figure-ground relationships, and her camera was at a fixed position above the artwork.

[citation needed] The technicians at Fleischer Studios created a distantly related device, called the Stereoptical Camera or Setback, in 1934.

[4] The camera was completed in early 1937 and tested in a Silly Symphony called The Old Mill, which won the 1937 Academy Award for Animated Short Film.

The multiplane was featured prominently in Disney films such as Pinocchio, Fantasia, Bambi, The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Sleeping Beauty and The Jungle Book.

Multiplane camera
Lotte Reiniger and husband Carl Koch, with assistants Walter Türck and Alexander Kardan, probably 1920s
Sketch of a computer-controlled, 4-plane Multiplane camera [1] , showing the glass-covered planes and the different motions.
Demonstration of the multiplane effect using three planes.
The 1937 multiplane camera developed by Walt Disney Studios