The 99-Year-Old Film That Stops People
Plus: news.
Welcome! Thanks for joining us. Here’s the slate for the latest edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter:
1) On The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926).
2) Animation newsbits.
A quick note. In June, we’re going to France for the Annecy Festival — the world’s leading animation event. We’ll be covering it on the ground for the first time, and there’s a lot we’re excited to see.
Now, here we go!
1 – The forever film
A post surprised us last month. Ryan Gaur, the animation journalist, drew attention to a clip from the film The Adventures of Prince Achmed. “Look at what humans can do,” he wrote.
That message — and the video — went viral.
Prince Achmed turned 99 earlier this month. Next year will be its centennial. Yet it still looks like magic to people, much as it did in 1926, when it debuted. There’s still a sense that human hands couldn’t possibly have created this film.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” said its director, Lotte Reiniger, about the response to Prince Achmed’s Berlin premiere. “They clapped at every effect, after every scene.”1
Reiniger was a member of the artist community in Weimar Germany. She and her team had advertised the premiere with postcards, sent “to everyone [they] knew.” Her old boss Fritz Lang (pre-Metropolis) was in the front row.2 Because Reiniger was out of touch with the press, her friend “Bert” helped by selecting journalists to contact. “Bert” was Bertolt Brecht, the playwright.
In many ways, the screening was a debacle. The projector lens broke before it began, and they were forced to stall as Reiniger’s husband, Carl Koch, ran to buy a replacement. The theater was over capacity, and so a police officer arrived to shut them down (and failed). And then, toward the end, smoke rose from the stage.
Reiniger wrote later:
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 flammable, and if the audience would get the faintest inkling what that smoke meant, panic would be the result. … 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!
The show was a hit — the first of many. Prince Achmed only had a limited run in Berlin, but it went everywhere, including six months of screenings in France. “For fantastic charm and marvelous artistry,” noted an American journalist in 1930, “it is doubtful if any motion picture has yet been produced to compare with The Adventures of Prince Achmed.”3
Prince Achmed is the oldest animated feature film that exists. A few predated it — but none of them survive today. In all those years, though, Reiniger’s craft has barely aged.
She didn’t think or work in the American style. Reiniger was a stop-motion artist who used cutout silhouettes to stage fairy tales. Her films are full of whimsy and flights of fancy — and they’re separate from the vaudeville tradition on which American cartoons were built.
“Mickey Mouse represents an extract of American music in tempo and abundance of wit,” Reiniger once argued.4 Her work operates in a different mode, at a different speed. In 1927, a British critic wrote the following about Prince Achmed:
No attempt has been made to emulate the smooth, continuous movements of the figures in the ordinary cartoon films. On the contrary, the figures in The Adventures of Prince Achmed have been endowed ... with a certain spasmodic jerkiness which, strangely enough, seems to add to rather than detract from the dramatic effect.5
That was the jittery liveliness Reiniger brought to her films, as she adjusted her characters frame by frame under the camera. “She was born with fairy hands,” said director Jean Renoir, another of her artist friends. He compared her to Mozart.6
Reiniger made her first animated short in 1919, a few years before Prince Achmed began. She was around 20, and already in Berlin’s bohemian scene — the artists and filmmakers and theater people. (“I was a hippie!” she recalled much later.)
From the start, Reiniger animated with cutout silhouettes. They were a German folk craft she’d loved since childhood — and, by the ‘20s, they were quite passé.7 But her films were special. She remembered that Marc Chagall, the painter, really enjoyed her Cinderella (1922). “I was very proud,” she said.
It was this special quality that led to Prince Achmed. In her early career, Reiniger worked at an institute with other filmmakers — and, around 1923, the banker Louis Hagen stopped by to see a project by Carl Koch (who’d recently married Reiniger). “So he then saw my films and the way I worked and suggested I make a feature film, something that had never been done before,” Reiniger remembered.
That banker became their benefactor. He set them up in Potsdam, in the attic of his garage. Hagen was Jewish and would one day flee Nazi Germany, but few could’ve imagined it then.8 Berlin was diverse, and many of the bohemians were against the old prejudices. Reiniger chose Hagen as the model for Prince Achmed himself.
From there, a small team assembled in Hagen’s garage.
Reiniger took the lead, while Koch juggled technical and administrative jobs — she called him “a real gardener” of the project. Joining them were two assistants (Alexander Kardan and Walter Türck) and two avant-garde film artists: Walter Ruttmann and Berthold Bartosch. There was also Hagen’s young son, who often showed up to observe.
The team was crammed together on a multiplane camera setup. It was a radical invention, but the studio was tiny and ad hoc: Reiniger wrote that she “had to kneel on the seat of an old dismantled motorcar” while she worked. It was in this space that they struggled with their movie — their “garage epic,” as she called it.9
Reiniger’s basis for Prince Achmed was the One Thousand and One Nights. “The action had to show events which could not be performed by any other means,” she noted. “So from all the 1,001 stories we sorted out all the events which fell into that category.”
She jotted down her ideas and characters as sketches. Then it was time to create everything by hand. Like she explained at the time:
My Prince had to be invented bodily, he had to be designed, cut out, wired, illuminated, moved and photographed.
At first I drew a picture of Prince Achmed, and after we were all convinced that he must look just so, I silhouetted him. And then I “built” him — out of cardboard, wire and thin sheet-lead, so that he might fulfill all his functions in the shadow-play in a natural and convincing manner. I articulated him, gave him a movable head, neck, shoulders, chest, abdomen, hips, legs, upper and lower arm, knees, hands and feet, fastened these together with hinges and pivots and then hammered and rolled him until he became a real, living figure for a shadow film.
We then bought quantities of tracing paper and from parchment we constructed the magic world in which he and his friend Aladdin were to perform their great deeds. Decoration followed upon decoration, cities with domes, towers and minarets, castles, clouds, starry heavens, lakes, woods and oceans, landscapes and magic caverns grew up around him. In order to fit him into these various surroundings in his true proportions I was forced to make his Royal Highness in 20 different sizes.10
Like Reiniger’s taste for papercrafts, her love of fairy tales wasn’t strictly up to date. She was attracted to stories about types, fantasies and imagination. The ‘20s were modern: a time of wildly new technology and art. Prince Achmed was technically avant-garde — but its appeal was popular and, in many ways, old.
Walter Ruttmann raised doubts about the project for that reason. Once, famously, he asked Reiniger what Prince Achmed had “to do with the year 1923.” She answered, “Nothing but that I am alive now, and I want to do it as I have the chance.”
Back then, Ruttmann was possibly the most renowned animator in Germany. He made abstract films set to music, inspiring people like Oskar Fischinger to follow him. His work was something explosive from the bohemian scene. And he intimidated Reiniger at first.
“It was quite rare to see such entirely different temperaments working together, since Ruttmann was a lot older than I and was considered a great artist whereas I was only a novice,” Reiniger said. “I was very scared of him but he seemed quite at ease doing the movements for the backgrounds whilst I worked on the characters’ movements.”
Ruttmann animated many of the special effects — using things like “soap and sand and paint,” not to mention wax.11 She was very happy with the scenes they created as a team. Berthold Bartosch also handled effects: in particular, the stormy sea that leaves Aladdin shipwrecked. It’s brilliant. Much later, Reiniger explained the process:
These waves were cut out of transparent paper, a different wave for each shot. Carefully numbered, they were replaced according to those numbers, frame by frame, on different glass plates. The first wave was laid on a glass plate on top, then the black ship on a clear glass plate, then the second wave underneath and the third one on still another glass plate. ... It was rather a cumbersome job, but the result was very convincing.12
There was little precedent for what they were doing — “animation was still walking in its infant shoes,” Reiniger said.13 They figured it out on the way. Prince Achmed took them three years, and the final film includes (in rough numbers) just 100,000 of the 250,000 frames they shot.
Reiniger often spoke about the stress of their blind work. Before processing, they could only guess at how things might look through a projector. They tried ambitious ideas anyway.
One was to sync the animation to music. Prince Achmed originally had no soundtrack — it’s a silent film. But it’s designed to mesh with a live score that develops with the story and lands on time with the action. This audiovisual trick had been done in Berlin animation before, but not at this length.14
The composer Wolfgang Zeller joined at an early stage. “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,” Reiniger wrote.
Then there was the color. Every moment of Prince Achmed was tinted with special processing to express tone and location and time of day. “We shot it in black and white and on the negative indicated the colors we wanted for each scene: it was very time consuming,” Reiniger said.
Even the story pushed boundaries. Reiniger injected it with her personal beliefs, as the scholar William Moritz once noted — including the heroic portrayal of the sorceress character, and the nods to liberation movements of the day. One of those nods was censored and released later as a standalone film, but elements remain in Prince Achmed. As Reiniger wrote:
… I knew lots of homosexual men and women from the film and theater world in Berlin, and saw how they suffered stigmatization. By contrast I was fascinated by how natural love between members of the same sex was depicted in the Arabian Nights, so I thought, let’s be casual and honest and truthful about it.15
The team knew that Prince Achmed was something unusual — in part because businesspeople were afraid of it. There’s comedy in the movie, but it isn’t a gag cartoon. It’s animated, but it runs for over an hour, like a live-action film.
Theaters’ hesitance left Louis Hagen “exhausted” and “furious,” Reiniger said. He couldn’t sell the film he’d funded. That inspired them to hold a premiere on their own — the memorable, wonderful, disastrous premiere with the lens and the smoke and the police.
Berlin’s art scene had been aware of Prince Achmed even beforehand. People like Bertolt Brecht and László Moholy-Nagy (of the Bauhaus) dropped by the attic during production, among many others.16 But the premiere cemented the movie and Reiniger’s reputation. As it traveled, Prince Achmed made the world’s papers for years to come.
What was shakier was bohemian Berlin — the film’s point of origin.
When the Nazis rose in the early ‘30s, Reiniger was appalled by what she called the whole “Hitler event.” Her husband Carl Koch, a firm socialist, could barely control his anger. She remembered him and Brecht cursing a large Nazi procession from the sidelines soon after Hitler took power.17
Reiniger and Koch spent much of the Nazi era in exile, and at times in hiding. Many of their bohemian friends fled. Meanwhile, others changed sides. Walter Ruttmann was rumored to be a communist, and he was a pioneer of abstract film in the ‘20s — what the Nazis came to call degenerate art. But he turned into “a bohemian Mitläufer,” a follower, and worked on Nazi propaganda films in the ‘30s.18
The scene that created Prince Achmed came apart. Louis Hagen’s son Budi, the boy who’d watched the project unfold, spent four months in a concentration camp during 1934. In the following years, he and his entire family escaped Germany.
At the end of World War II, the original Prince Achmed negative was destroyed during the Battle of Berlin. The same happened to many of Reiniger’s other films. More pressing to her and Koch, though, was the end of Nazism. “And yet the joy is great / we are finally rid of Adolf!” she wrote in May 1945.
In the late ‘40s, the two of them moved to England and began a new leg of their career. And, as it happened, a copy of Prince Achmed had been saved in a British archive.
Work was already underway to preserve it — and to re-release the film. “When I went to London for the first time I met the person who’d been working on the film,” Reiniger said. “It was the son of that banker from Potsdam who’d financed the film. … He saw it as a kind of family affair.”
The younger Hagen had moved to England as well. His effort helped to keep Prince Achmed alive. Soon, he went into business with Reiniger in London, producing her new films.19
Across the rest of Reiniger’s life, her old feature continued to get people with its wonder and its popular appeal. It was a classic, but it never felt like work to watch. The critic Cecile Starr once called it “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.”
Today, 99 years after its premiere, it’s still making people pause in their feeds. They stop to look at what humans can do.
Prince Achmed’s era is distant: the silent movie period, the art scene of Weimar Berlin, the hyperinflation that was underway when production started. The complexities of that time have faded into the past. What remains is the work, which is for all times. Reiniger’s magic survived the war — and it’s here for good.
2 – Newsbits
We lost Steve Pepoon (68), co-creator of The Wild Thornberrys.
The Glassworker from Pakistan is set for a theatrical release stateside. A great piece of news.
The Girl with the Occupied Eyes, an eye-popping Portuguese short from last year, is on track to become a series.
In America, almost half-a-million dollars were raised through the AnimAID auction — designed to support animation workers affected by the fires this year.
Starting this month in Czechia, there’s a retrospective on the art, films and life of Jiří Trnka. This is reportedly Prague’s “first comprehensive exhibition” of the artist since the early ‘90s.
Animator Natalia Mirzoyan spoke at length about immigrating to Estonia from Russia, after getting fired for displaying a Ukrainian flag on social media.
Since our last update, Jumbo’s success in Indonesia has continued. As Reuters reported this week, it’s “been watched by more than 9.6 million people locally and earned more than $20 million.”
In Cuba, animation workers are talking about the challenges they face in the country — a lack of personnel, equipment and more. Things are in a desperate state compared to the industry’s rich days of the ‘60s and ‘70s.
In Russia, the government announced a heavy investment in animation — on the recommendation of Soyuzmultfilm’s head, Yuliana Slashcheva.
Last of all: we wrote about the golden age of animation preservation that’s currently underway.
Until next time!
From Reiniger’s interview in Women and Animation: A Compendium, one of our most important sources today, quoted throughout.
See The Silent Picture (Autumn 1970) — our other most-valuable and most-quoted source.
From the Portland Press Herald (December 28, 1930). The detail about the screenings in France comes from Lotte Reiniger: Schöpferin einer neuen Silhouettenkunst, another crucial source.
See the booklet for the Musik und Zaubereien DVD set of Reiniger films.
That’s The Daily Telegraph (May 9, 1927).
Quoted in Sight and Sound (Summer 1979).
Details from The Guardian (November 30, 1936, and September 28, 1971) and the documentary Lotte Reiniger über ihr Leben und den Silhouettenschnitt, included on the German Blu-ray edition of Prince Achmed. That last one was a key source.
Quoted in Filmmakers Newsletter (Summer 1974).
Quoted in The New York Times (July 18, 1926). This is an English version of a pamphlet released alongside the film in German — Lotte Reinigers silhouettenfilm: Die Geschichte des Prinzen Achmed. It’s available online via the Margaret Herrick Library.
Ruttmann licensed Fischinger’s wax-slicing machine to create special effects. See Optical Poetry: The Life and Work of Oskar Fischinger.
See Reiniger’s book Shadow Puppets, Shadow Theaters and Shadow Films.
From the press kit to the 2001 Milestone Film release of Prince Achmed.
See William Moritz’s 1974 article in Film Culture (No. 58-59-60) for details about an earlier synced animation.
Detail from Schöpferin einer neuen Silhouettenkunst.
Another from Schöpferin einer neuen Silhouettenkunst.
See Film Culture and Kulturfilm, page 86. Author Barry Fulks tried to unravel the situation with Ruttmann, coming to the conclusion that he was “at least” in the Mitläufer group.
See The Daily Telegraph (November 27, 1956) and Sightlines (Summer 1980). The latter is also the source of Starr’s quote about masterpieces.
On youtube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RlnylV5lQk
LOVE, LOVE THIS WOMAN AND HER FILMS! She was over in Canada in the late 70s finishing up one of her films. Her producers came to Michigan and gave a week long workshop on her and her technique. I discovered my passion! A year or two later, I got into Calarts and worked on that technique for my film. Now I show young students at both Community colleges I teach at how to create her Silhouettes films with black paper, Lotte's special wire hinges, tinted layers and frame by frame movement. Thanks for writing this article.