Lotte Reiniger’s ‘The Adventures of Prince Achmed’

Allow me to take you on a little genre detour. A recent talk with a friend of mine reminded me about a gem of a film. There’s sorcery, black magic and witches but Lotte Reiniger’s The Adventures of Prince Achmed is more fantasy based than horror. Still I feel compelled to share with you a few videos of this beautiful 1926 Germanic tale of an Arabian Prince as told through shadow puppet animation. The oldest surviving animated feature film to be exact.

The magical beings brought to life by Reiniger were constructed through her own invention which involved manipulated cutouts made from cardboard and thin sheets of lead under a camera. The puppets were then posed carefully and animated frame by frame. If you know anything about animation like this, then you understand how time consuming this is but the results are exquisite.

The original prints were tinted which contributes to the surreal quality of the animation. Phosphorescent characters melt in and out of frame like dream paintings faded with time. Veiled dancing figures are strikingly detailed–every finger and hair twitching to life.

Reiniger based her animation off the 1001 Arabian Nights tale, The Story of Prince Ahmed and the and The Fairy Paribanou featured in Andrew Lang’s The Blue Fairy Book.  The original score by Wolfgang Zeller is still my favorite; it was been redone by British musician Geoff Smith in 2008. Reiniger worked on a few projects after Prince Achmed, some of which never came to fruition. For her third attempt she started work on Ravel’s 1925 opera, L’enfant et les sortilèges (The Child and the Bewitched Things) but copyright issues prevented her from finishing.

Reiniger would have done an amazing job translating this opera to film. L’enfant was one of the first operas I ever heard as a child and I was sufficiently terrified by its story. Basically, it’s about a boy who destroys all the things in his room so the objects come to life and seek revenge. There’s also a garden filled with animals that attack him! I also love her animation for Hansel and Gretel.

Here are a few clips from The Adventures of Prince Achmed.