Silhouette animation

Her influence is evident as far away as Japan, with Toshio Suzuki's Yonjunin no Tozoku (Forty Burglars, 1928), and as early as 1924, with Hidehiko Okuda, Tomu Uchida and Hakuzan Kimura's Kanimanji Engi (The Tale of Crab Temple).

[citation needed] The computer animated fan-film Emesis Blue used backlighting and silhouettes to distinguish original background characters from the stock Source Filmmaker assets used for the protagonists.

It utilizes figures cut out of paperboard, sometimes reinforced with thin metal sheets, and tied together at their joints with thread or wire (usually substituted by plastic or metal paper fasteners in contemporary productions) which are then moved frame-by-frame on an animation stand and filmed top-down with a rostrum camera – such techniques were used, albeit with stylistic changes, by such practitioners as Noburō Ōfuji in the 1940s and Bruno J. Böttge in the 1970s.

[3] This was also the first silhouette animation to successfully make characters appear to speak for themselves (traditionally, either intertitles or voice-over narration had been used) as the mixed medium made accurate lip syncing possible.

Most recently, several CGI silhouette films have been made, which demonstrate different approaches to the technique – Jossie Malis' use already 2D, vector animation, [5] Michel Ocelot's "Earth Intruders" (2007) and a scene in Azur et Asmar (Azur & Asmar, 2006) use 3D figures rendered as silhouettes, while Anthony Lucas' Academy Award-nominated The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello (2005) mixes 2D characters and 3D backgrounds, both of which are combination of live action and CGI.

Computer animation has also been used to make more explicit reference to shadow theatre – particularly of the Southeast Asian wayang kulit style – by adding visible rods to the characters which appear to be operating them (ironically, in CGI, it is the other way round).