January 7, 2003

Walt Disney’s breakthrough film Snow White is often thought to be the first animated feature film. While essentially true when it comes to hand-drawn animation, there was at least one full-length film utilizing animated techniques that preceded that great work to screen by over a decade, Lotte Eisner’s 1926 silhouette masterpiece The Adventures of Prince Achmed. Now, with the release of the movie to DVD by Milestone Film and Video, animation fans with a historical bent can see this landmark achievement in all its glory.

The story of Prince Achmed comes to us by way of the Arabian Nights. First we see an evil magician create a flying horse and bring it to the local Caliph, hoping to trade it for the man’s beautiful princess daughter. Her brother Achmed steps in to void the transaction, but the magician fools the young man into getting on the horse and it flies away into the rarefied clouds. Not knowing how to control the beast at first, the Prince then ends up far from home on some tropical islands. There he falls in love with the lovely Peri Banu, a natural deity who controls the local demon folk. From this point the story progresses with the mismatched pair trying to leave the islands together and having to battle the evil magician in addition to warding off hosts of flying demons to end up in each other’s arms. Along the way there are also encounters with yet another powerful magician (who turns out to be mortal enemies with the first shaman we saw) as well as an interlude wherein Aladdin and his magic lamp appear to lend even more depth to the fractious twists of the adventure.

Though the story here might be fairly standard fairy tale stuff, the movie is assuredly not run-of-the-mill. The camera negative and all other theatrical copies of the original German Prince Achmed were lost, but luckily the archive of the British Film Institute had a colored nitrate positive copy on hand from which this restoration could be done. The film itself represents a stunning achievement, as the animation consists entirely of figures cut from black cardboard with hinges and thin wires used in tandem with stop-motion camerawork to create the illusion of motion. Additionally, though much of the film is black and white, some of the scenes employ colored backgrounds that were created by laboriously hand tinting the individual frames of the film.

The Adventures of Prince Achmed would undoubtedly need to be considered a groundbreaking accomplishment on the amazing quality of its unique animation alone, but the fact that its director was a woman makes it even more historically important. To the present day directors of film are far more likely to be male, and during the 1920s it was exceedingly rare for a woman to helm a project such as this one. But even in childhood, filmmaker Lotte Reiniger began to work with silhouettes as an artistic outlet, being inspired early on by the films of Melies. At the age of fifteen she attended a lecture by Paul Wegener (who made the silent film The Golem), and he aided her in getting work that led to her doing some short and commercial films at first, and then eventually resulted in the feature film under discussion.

In bringing this film to DVD, Milestone Film and Video has performed a great service for fans of animation. The transfer to digital has been handled well, and though there are imperfections inherent in the original that remain, the quality of the viewing experience is quite high. Also utilized is the beautiful original orchestral score that was composed for Prince Achmed by Wolfgang Zeller. As far as extras go, the disk also includes an optional audio track (the default is German intertitles with English subtitling), a stills gallery, and a bonus short commercial film by Reiniger, The Secret of the Marquise. Lastly, accompanying the 67-minute feature itself is an hour-long documentary by Katja Raganelli named Lotte Reiniger: Homage to the Inventor of the Silhouette Film. Though fairly fawning in tone, this valuable addition to the package affords the viewer the opportunity to learn much about the animator’s life and the way that her films were created.

All in all, this entire offering is both a worthwhile accounting of a true animation pioneer as well as a delicate entertainment in its own right. While it may seem that much of the attraction of a DVD reissue of this movie would simply be historical, one shouldn’t overlook the charming lure of the feature itself. Reiniger’s animated silhouettes are so well done and lifelike that during the course of watching The Adventures of Prince Achmed, I often forgot about the jaw-dropping technical achievement and was merely swept up by the enchanting nature of the celluloid fable. When it comes to animation, this happenstance is indicative of something that has changed little in nearly an entire century of film - whether watching a 75-year-old movie made with cardboard cutouts or the newest computer animated epic, it’s when the quality of the storytelling is such that you forget to pay attention to the technique at all that you realize you are watching a real masterpiece. This 1926 German outing easily attains such heights, and it is to the benefit of film fans everywhere that we again have the chance to see such a masterful talent at work.

View other columns by Chris Hyde