“Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: the first animated movie ever, a trailblazer for generations of great cinema”. That’s how I opened my Disney Sunday series three years ago, and I must apologize for my ignorance. Despite its many other innovative accomplishments, Disney’s Snow White was not the first animated feature. In fact that feat belongs to some movie that is likely lost forever. But the earliest feature-length animated film that survives is actually a 1926 German movie called The Adventures of Prince Achmed, animated entirely in silhouette, pre-dating Disney’s debut by thirteen years, and most interestingly of all, directed by Lotte Reiniger, a woman pioneer of the medium.
Reiniger had in fact made a number of short animated films in Germany throughout the early years of the twentieth century, using a method she herself invented, an early form of multiplane camera -the device used in traditional animation to film frames atop one another to create the illusion of depth and movement. She painstakingly filmed The Adventures of Prince Achmed using this. The silent movie was a risky venture but a successful one ultimately, still fascinating and impressive to watch to this day,
An amalgam of various Arabian Nights, the plot follows the titular Prince Achmed, the son of a wealthy Caliph. When a sorcerer comes to marry Dinarsade, the Caliph’s daughter, Achmed is whisked away on a magical flying horse. Through a series of adventures wherein he courts a foreign ruler, fights monsters, and teams up with a poor boy called Aladdin, he tries to return to his home to defeat the sorcerer and rescue his sister.
There’s a real hypnotic quality to this story and the way its presented. Much like the obvious influence on Reiniger, shadow puppetry, it’s very soothing and simply told, yet its expressionism keeps you enraptured. The effect is that it takes you back to a time before film or modern literature, of oral and humbly visual storytelling, and you’re experiencing this story as the fantastical fable it is; perhaps even the way the composers of the One Thousand and One Nights intended. The characters are obviously all archetypes (flat both figuratively and literally), the motivations incredibly basic, and the story about as episodic as you’d find in any classical hero cycle. But because the movie is so unabashedly traditionalist, one of the greatest homages conceived to the style of story it’s retelling, it engages you as much as hearing the Odyssey does.
But the main point to discuss is obviously this movies’ animation. The shadows contrasted against tinted colours, often yellows and golds (though also blues and greens), it very much fits in with the expressionist aesthetic popular in German film during the 1920s. That hypnotic dream-like quality of the film, as well as its lack of logic, can be attributed to the style as well. But I think The Adventures of Prince Achmed resembles those marks by accident. The absence of traditional logic is owing to the story being a folk tale, and the shadows and silhouettes on light is perhaps hearkening back to ancient forms of art, or else just Reiniger’s own speciality. It certainly is one that sets her apart, and she knows how to use it well. Whether that’s in understanding how to vary up the visual appeal by giving each setting a different coloured back-drop, or in going to the trouble of animating minor details of scenes (something that wasn’t a necessity at the time) to make the story feel more lively. The designs really stand out. Each location is crafted with ornate authentically recreated Arabian architecture and nature. The figures too, though very lanky, all have an elegance to them, minus the ugly sorcerer and witch, and a caricatured Chinese Emperor. Indeed one might mistake them for actually being shadow puppets carefully filmed, at least until Reiniger takes some more creative liberties. The best showcases of the animation is in the transformation scenes, a device she employs quite often both as a narrative point to show deceptiveness, but also merely to show off a technique. The sorcerer turns into a bat, birds become women, a cluster of trees become an elephant, a Hydra makes an appearance, and in the climax, the witch who helps Achmed duels the evil sorcerer by transforming into various animals of attack (and it’s much better than The Sword in the Stone). These are not fast changes either, but gradual, which actually adds to their appeal. The craftsmanship is constantly apparent, and knowing the amount of work that went into every frame to so flawlessly convey these effects makes them that much more delightful to watch. Reiniger additionally experiments with the form in a few ways beyond the now conventional methods. There are some scenes where a portion of the frame remains immobile, seemingly there for decoration, only to eventually become part of the action as the scene goes on. Such is the case with a hanging loft when Achmed stumbles upon a harem, or the magic lamp that Aladdin finds in a cave. She also plays with perspective occasionally switching from profiles to head-on shots of characters, and utilizing optical illusion.
Few people have heard of The Adventures of Prince Achmed. Even less know of Lotte Reiniger and the impact she had on animation. From Michel Ocelot’s Princes et Princesses to the animated segment of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1, the end credits that were way better than the movie of Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, to something as recent as The Breadwinner; all bear the mark of her influence. Even Disney, the company that stole the spotlight from her and many other animators, has paid homage at various intervals of their history. I don’t mean to take away from the innovations and breakthroughs Disney did make, especially in their early animation and first feature as well. But technically Reiniger got there first; a really powerful victory for women in film that has almost completely been forgotten. I was entranced by Reiniger’s work, and greater audiences should have the chance to be as well.
It’s really interesting that both Walt Disney and Lotte Reiniger completely independent of each other found fairy tales an ideal subject matter for animation. Perhaps they knew the wonders of those kind of stories would be better conveyed through animation. Perhaps understanding their target audience they wished to entertain and enthral children with imagination-filled stories of magic. Maybe they remembered the power these kind of stories could have from their own childhoods. Regardless, they set the stage for a medium of film that would go on to do extraordinary things.
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