In this sampling of Lotte Reiniger’s short films, the animator’s intricate marvels illustrate a variety of myths, fairy tales and fables, with a couple of operatic interludes. Aside from their bewitching beauty and charm, Reiniger’s shorts are seldom only that; she may imbue them with quirky humor, ominous undertones or even a little feminism. Occasionally, she also adjusts these well-worn tales to suit her—most delightfully experienced in her alternate ending to Bizet’s Carmen. The film’s cheeky irreverence apparently upset German censors at the 1934 Berlinale and reinforces the often-obscured fact that her work was just as much made for adults as it was for children. All ages can succumb to the wonder, jokes and romantic fantasy that Reiniger’s fanciful shadowlands conjure, whether it is the eerie magic in The Stolen Heart or her reversed moral in the elaborate woodland theater of The Grasshopper and the Ant. Naturally, her version of Papageno’s song from Mozart’s The Magic Flute is particularly exquisite, for as Jean Renoir famously remarked, Reiniger’s films are the “visual expression of Mozart’s music.”