The earliest surviving animated feature is also an example of prodigious artistry in a minimal form. Based on tales of the Arabian Nights, Lotte Reiniger’s film uses silhouette figures photographed in stop-motion against voluptuous backgrounds. A gifted designer as well as a spellbinding storyteller, Reiniger creates a cohesive visual universe through which Prince Achmed rides on his magical horse, wooing a fair princess and battling a host of demons. This silent film (Wolfgang Zeller composed the original accompanying score) may seem like an art film, but it has a zest to entrance any children or adults with open eyes and minds.
Inspired from childhood by the Chinese tradition of silhouette puppetry, Reiniger entered the teeming German film industry and devised silhouette sequences for Paul Wegener’s The Pied Piper of Hamelin (1918) and Fritz Lang’s 1922 Wagner film Siegfried’s Death. The following year, she was commissioned to make Prince Achmed, which she completed when she was just 26. Her next feature, the 1928 Dr. Dolittle and His Animals, had a score by Paul Hindemith, Kurt Weill and Paul Dessau. With Carl Koch (her husband, producer and cinematographer for 40 years), she made several animated shorts in the early years of the Third Reich before leaving for England in 1937. That was the year of Snow White, which immediately established the fuller, softer, more realistic form of animation as the norm. Reiniger died in Dettenhausen, Germany, in 1981 at the age of 82, but the glory of Prince Achmed is immortal.