Things That Aren't Being Lost
On the preservation of animation.
Welcome! In this issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, we’re talking about animation lost, found and restored.
Film stock isn’t forever. Possibly the first animated feature, El Apóstol (1917), is no longer with us. It broke ground: a 70-minute movie of cutout puppets, special effects and rotoscoping. Director Quirino Cristiani made it in Buenos Aires, and its three-month theatrical run was well received. Then fire claimed it.1
The same almost happened to the work of Lotte Reiniger.
Her film The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) is the earliest surviving feature-length animation. She made it in Weimar Germany — and it’s a masterpiece. It had a six-month run in France and traveled to Japan. By 1927, even the American press was glowing about its “remarkable sense of beauty” and its flights of imagination.
In 1945, its camera negative was destroyed.
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