The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926)
A sorcerer tricks Prince Achmed onto a flying horse that carries him to distant kingdoms, a demon army and the witch who becomes his ally. Reiniger cut every figure from black paper by hand and animated them frame by frame under glass — the oldest surviving feature-length animated film.
Three years of cutting paper with scissors, one silhouette at a time. It predates Disney’s first feature by more than a decade.
Background
The Adventures of Prince Achmed is the oldest surviving feature-length animated film, made by the German animator Lotte Reiniger using a silhouette animation technique she had developed: cutting intricate figures from black cardboard and thin lead, then animating them frame by frame beneath a sheet of glass lit from below. The production reportedly took around three years to complete, a testament to how labor-intensive the technique was.
What to watch for
Watch for the delicate detail in the silhouette figures, achieved through carefully jointed cutouts that allowed for surprisingly fluid movement, and for the elaborate layered backgrounds that give some scenes real depth despite the flat, shadow-puppet style of the characters. The film predates Walt Disney’s first animated feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, by more than a decade, and it stands as an early demonstration that animation could sustain a full-length fantasy narrative.
