A Film That Shines After One Hundred Years
Plus: news.
Welcome! This is another Sunday issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, and our slate goes like this:
1. A story for the centenary of The Adventures of Prince Achmed.
2. Animation newsbits.
Now, let’s go!
1. Reiniger on her creation
It was a century ago this weekend. On the Sunday of May 2, 1926, the first public screening of The Adventures of Prince Achmed took place in Berlin.1
The film is the earliest animated feature that survives today. It predates Snow White by more than a decade — and, after one hundred years, it’s still an incredible thing.
The author Cecile Starr once wrote, “The Adventures of Prince Achmed is an acclaimed masterpiece … [that] is also amusing, surprising, frightening, passionate and entertaining, which means that it can easily hold its own against non-masterpieces as well.” She was absolutely correct.2
Behind the film was animator Lotte Reiniger, a member of Weimar Germany’s bohemian art scene. With silhouettes cut out of cardboard and thin lead, and joined at the joints with wires, she told gorgeous stop-motion stories. Even before Prince Achmed, artists like Marc Chagall had praised her. Then this film drew eyes around the world; even an American paper quickly declared it a “masterpiece.”3
Pulling from the One Thousand and One Nights, Reiniger and her small team made a movie whose magic is hard to believe. That’s true even technically. This is an hourlong piece with rich colors and a complex, synchronized score, done before the era of talkies or color films, and at a time when animation was short as a rule.
The film was unusual, too, in its use of animated drama — and in its social points. “In the 1920s equal rights for women and homosexuals formed part of the agenda for socialists, and Reiniger also treated those issues with good consciousness,” wrote the scholar William Moritz. Reiniger’s work was visibly affected by the liberation movements of that period.4
We covered the making of Prince Achmed last year, in one of our favorite issues we’ve printed. That said, getting the story from the director herself is a different experience. And, fortunately, Reiniger made that possible in her lifetime.
Around 56 years ago, she penned a wonderful firsthand account of Prince Achmed for a journal called The Silent Picture (1968–1974).5 To honor the film’s hundredth birthday, we’re sharing it below. We hope you’ll enjoy!
The Adventures of Prince Achmed
or
What May Happen to Somebody Trying to Make a Full-Length Cartoon in 1926
In the year 1919 I, Lotte Reiniger, was introduced by Paul Wegener, the leading figure of artistic film making in Berlin by this time (Student of Prague, The Golem, etc.), to a group of young people, who opened up a studio of scientific and artistic films. This group was called Institut fuer Kulturforschung, under the leadership of Dr. Hans Cuerlis, a friend of Paul Wegener. In this Institut I made my first silhouette film, followed by various others, and they did quite well in the cinemas and in advertising. It was the time of the inflation, and the dollars they brought in made us go along quite well.
We had not so much the idea to make money with these films, but more to be able to carry on. For at that time animation was in its infancy; there was just Felix the Cat, Fleischer’s cartoons and so forth, Mickey Mouse was far away in the future. For the film-makers of this period, those were the days: with each film we could make new discoveries, find new problems, new possibilities, technical and artistic, we were most eager to execute. The whole field was virgin soil and we had all the joys of explorers in an unknown country. It was wonderful.
Yet, when in 1923, a Berlin banker, Louis Hagen, visited the Institut and saw us at work, and asked us whether we could consider making a full-length picture in silhouettes, we had to think twice. This was a never heard of thing. Animated films were supposed to make people roar with laughter, and nobody had dared to entertain an audience with them for more than ten minutes. Everybody to whom we talked in the industry about that proposition was horrified.
But we did not belong to the industry. We always had been outsiders and we always had done what we wanted to do. Our friends were artists of the same caliber who approached films in their own ways, such as [Walter] Ruttmann, [Berthold] Bartosch, [Hans] Richter and [Viking] Eggeling and others. So we were not afraid of the challenge.
As the making of those silhouette films did not require very expensive equipment nor a great personnel, and money in this time of inflation became less valuable from day to day, our conscience was not over-burdened in that direction. So we decided to accept that most tempting proposal.
The banker did not want this film to be made in the framework of the Institut and offered to install a studio for us above his garages in the vegetable gardens of his house in Potsdam. So we went there. We being me and my husband Carl Koch, who had married me meantime, and later on Berthold Bartosch, who had also worked with us in the Institut.
The studio was very low, being an attic under the roof, so the shooting field with its glass plate had to be very near the floor in order to get the camera up high enough in a suitable distance, with just enough space to place the lamps underneath. I had to kneel on the seat of an old dismantled motorcar to execute my manipulation. I liked this very much; it was a much more comfortable position for me than sitting on a swivel chair as I had to do later on.
The whole contraption looked like a four-poster bed, the camera being supported by sturdy wooden beams, on which we could fix and take off to our heart’s content every construction we might need for our special effects. In the Institut I had obtained my stop motion with the aid of a bicycle pump, which worked very well. But this time we intended to be as modern as possible, and so at the advice of cameraman Guenther Rittau, who worked for no lesser person than Fritz Lang, we had a motor of a special design installed. I did not take kindly to that motor at all, for it had to be set to work by a lever, a movement which distracted me from my attention to the figures on the glass plate, who demanded a rapt concentration throughout the shooting, whilst the reclining movement of pulling the string of the good bicycle pump allowed my eyes to be fixed on my scene perpetually. Furthermore, I could do it with my left hand and keep my right steady and free from blood pressure for the touch of the figures, which had always required utmost delicacy. Many years later, when I had a technically much more advanced rostrum installed, I ruefully went back to my old-fashioned bicycle pump.
As the theme for this long lasting enterprise we had chosen the Arabian Nights. The action had to show events which could not be performed by any other means. So from all the 1001 stories we sorted out all the events which fell into that category; the flying horse, magic islands, fantastic birds, djinns, sorcerers and witches, transformations and all there is to be found in abundance in these tales, and out of these items we formed the script.
I felt very bashful towards my serious collaborators, to engage them in such a fairy tale world, but for me it was real. “What has this to do with the year 1923?” said Walter Ruttmann. “Nothing,” I could only say, “but that I am alive now, and I want to do it as I have the chance.” But he did the most wonderful things for this film, and the bits I did together with him are the ones I am most proud of.
I am very proud also of the magnificent sea journey Berthold Bartosch composed and executed for Aladdin’s flight. Nowadays, of course, waves are often seen in animation, but this was absolutely brand new. We could not stop Bartosch experimenting with waves afterwards. Only too natural, for one can do anything still better, but we had to finish the film one day. Here it was to the great merit of Carl Koch, the producer, who stopped us from going to seed with endless experiments. He was a real gardener.
So we started in 1923 and finished in 1926. Starting with black-and-white only and gradually developing more scenery as movable backgrounds, using soap and sand and paint on different layers, sometimes two negatives, each done on different animation benches and composed by the different artists entirely after their own conception. The anxiety of this process was sometimes almost unbearable. Whilst working you only see your figures on your composition in one position. What will it look like when it moves, or what the two compositions, which might look all right in themselves, will look like when they are printed together, were riddles whose solution could only be awaited with hope. Many of the things we did are nowadays a household word, but we really did them for the first time. Often we had to experiment for weeks until we got them ready for shooting.
Although this was the time of the silent film, we were anxious to provide our picture with every support to ensure its coming over well to its audience. So we had the musician Wolfgang Zeller collaborating with us throughout this time, composing the score. When for instance a procession was wanted he composed a march, we measured with stop watches and tried to move the figures according to its beat. Or a Glockenspiel was executed to measure. In this period the better theaters employed an orchestra and for the more ambitious films special music was composed. In our score, for this purpose, small pictures of the film were cut out and pasted in, so that the conductor knew where he had to place his intended effects.
For the first performance of the film in London and Paris Wolfgang Zeller was invited to come and conduct the orchestra himself.
The most troublesome time for us came when the inflation stopped. Money was worth something now and we were only half way through. Would our financier allow us to carry on? We finished in Spring 1926.
When the film was finished, we did not find any theater which wished to play it. So we arranged on our own a first performance at the Volksbuehne, a theater in the North of Berlin, where Wolfgang Zeller was in charge of the orchestra. His musicians had consented to play for us on a Sunday morning for his sake. We invited the press and all the people we could think of on postcards. As we had led a very remote life during the production, we had not had much contact with the press; our friend Bert Brecht helped us a great deal to invite the right people. It had to be on a Sunday morning, and as it was Spring and good weather had broken out, we did not think that many people would sacrifice a beautiful morning to see a mysterious, never-heard-of silhouette film in an out-of-the-way theater. But they all came and the theater was over-crowded.
There were rows going on among the audience about their seats, which were not numbered, and some people took the numbers of their cloakroom tickets for seat numbers and claimed them angrily. I also saw people who were of great importance to us, like Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou, sitting on quite unfavorable seats right in front of the screen. Then Dr. Karl With, a renowned expert on the arts, started his opening speech, and the audience calmed down. But became restless again as he talked on and on, much to my amazement, as we had agreed that his address should be only short. Anyhow, finally he stopped and the film started, and the audience reacted very favorably to it.
Only when I went behind the curtain in the first interval (by this time films were projected in reels) I heard what had happened. Just before the start, the projector lens had broken. It was Sunday morning, where on earth could we get another one? To step in front of the already angry audience and tell them that they had made their journey in vain required more courage than any of us possessed. In his despair my husband took a taxi and drove to the big Ufa house. He well knew that it was closed on Sundays, so whether he intended to smash the shop windows or what, I don’t know. He stood there and looked at all the brilliant equipment displayed in the windows, when a gentleman approached the entrance, he had a key, and proceeded to open the door. Koch dashed towards him and told him in moving words of our desperate situation in the Volksbuehne, and the gentleman was not only willing to help, but could help. So Koch arrived back at the theater triumphantly with another lens, and Karl With could stop his unwillingly prolonged speech.
But this was not all. In the middle of the performance, which was enthusiastically received by the audience, a policeman arrived behind stage and ordered us to stop the performance for the theater was overcrowded. Koch, who was responsible, took flight, climbing a ladder into the upper stage, where the wings were hung, like in a Marx Brothers film. He came down only when the end of the next reel was acknowledged by the audience with a burst of applause. Koch grabbed me by the arm, and introduced me to the baffled policeman as the budding artist on the brink of an obvious success, who would be completely ruined. And what would the enthusiastic audience say if he would stop it with just one more reel to come? The audience clapped on, and I went out to take my bow with a heartrending look at the stern defender of law and order, who said threateningly, “You will hear from me...” and went away.
But the real fright was yet to come. In the last reel of that film there is a big battle between black and white spirits, but I saw suddenly something on the screen, something which was neither of those spirits, but obviously smoke. As I knew full well that we had not shot any smoke in that sequence, my heart stood still. Something must be burning on stage. I ran there very frightened, for in that period film was still very inflammable, and if the audience would get the faintest inkling what that smoke meant, panic would be the result. (How right the policeman had been.) But the reason was harmless enough: the stagehands, who wanted to see the film, had placed some wet sacks on the central heating and forgotten to take them away, and they had started smoldering just in front of the projector. The audience, however, had taken the clouds as an artistically intended effect! And so this performance came to a happy ending, especially as its success was followed by a real first night in Paris and later on in the Gloria Palast in Berlin.
2. Newsbits
We lost Kazuo Ebisawa (72–73), among the longest-serving artists in anime background art. He touched Akira, Kiki’s Delivery Service, X and many more.
In the Netherlands, the Blender Foundation backed away from a long-term corporate sponsorship by Anthropic.
The Mexican film I Am Frankelda will have its worldwide release on June 12, via Netflix.
A highlight of this week is Dracula 2, an indie short by the American animator Austin Kimmell. It’s an adult comedy that really gets the value of funny, clever drawings and movement — with lots of great timing.
In France, the Annecy Festival revealed its feature film lineup for 2026. On the list: Viva Carmen, Cartoon Saloon’s Julian and the Chinese hit Nobody.
A Russian Telegram channel we like, Watermelon Rind Boats, now has a Substack newsletter. It launched with a cool archival article penned in the ‘60s by director Fyodor Khitruk (Winnie-the-Pooh).
On that note: this week, we discovered You’re an Animal through the same Telegram channel. It’s a cutout film done with recycled plastic bags, put together in Armenia by students of the Invisible Friends collective. No subtitles, but the visuals and soundtrack are pretty lovely by themselves.
The Bones (2021) was released online for free. This is an unsettling one from Chilean animators Cristobal León and Joaquín Cociña. As with their cult film The Wolf House, it isn’t for everyone. But it hasn’t left us since we first saw it.
At Cannes Film Market this month, Ghana’s AnimaxFYB will seek partners and investors for Oraya, a feature.
Last of all: we took a fresh look at Pixar’s classic Luxo Jr. (1986).
Until next time!
See Lotte Reiniger: Schöpferin einer neuen Silhouettenkunst, used a few times.
From Sightlines (Summer 1980).
This paragraph draws from The New York Times (July 18, 1926) and Women and Animation: A Compendium.
The Reiniger article was published in The Silent Picture (Autumn 1970).
Wonderful piece! In Taiwan there is a long history of puppet theater. We have a few magnificent puppetry museums here that showcase this rare and underappreciated form of performance. The film you researched shows an incredible amount of dedication and talent!
The craftsmanship never ceases to amaze me.