The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926)

One might be forgiven for thinking that the animated feature-length movie began with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. However there were earlier works. Not all of these are available anymore, but the oldest surviving animated movie was made over ten years before Walt Disney’s breakthrough feature film.

The earliest feature-length animated film is The Adventures of Prince Achmed, and it occupies an unusual place in cinema history for a number of other reasons too. It is a German silent movie from the 1920s, not a time or medium associated with animation. It was also made by a woman. Even today it is unusual to watch a film that is not the work of a man. There are a few female directors such as Jane Campion or Kathryn Bigelow, but moviemaking remains a man’s world.

The woman was Lotte Reiniger. She made a large number of short animated works, but sadly most of them are lost today. I first saw one of her stories playing on a loop in my local museum. It was an adaptation of Hansel and Gretel, and I was charmed by the simplicity and loving care with which the story was rendered. There were sentient animals, but due to the age of the movie there was no room for wisecracking dialogue.

To watch the film was to watch a pure work of art – not the ambiguous or enigmatic art of a Dali, but something more transparent and direct. The work was innocent, and Reiniger clearly felt it was enough to create a sense of wonder in the viewer without straining for any higher effect than that.

While Reiniger is sometimes associated with the avant-garde movement, this is not apparent in her works. There is perhaps a glimpse of it at the beginning of The Adventures of Prince Achmed. The film opens with peculiar unidentifiable shapes that eventually solidify into the characters in the story. Each character is then introduced in turn.

At this point it is necessary to say something about how Reiniger produced the effects. Indeed some would dispute whether Prince Achmed is an animated film in the true sense of the word. The characters and settings are silhouettes, though Reiniger is careful to assign each character a unique shape that allows us to easily identify them.

The images were created with the use of cardboard cut-outs and thin sheets of lead under the camera. The cut-outs were held together by thread. Sometimes the wire held as many as 50 pieces together. If the movements on the screen bring to mind the jerky stop-motion monsters of Ray Harryhausen, this thought is not entirely fanciful. The action was put together, using stills, nearly 100,000 of which made the final cut.

This style may seem crude and primitive compared to the Disney cartoon, let alone the three-dimensional effects commonly used in animation today. Nonetheless it is amazing what effects can be achieved with the limited materials available if the creative mind behind them has imagination and flair.

Reiniger’s characters cannot speak to us except through intertitles, but they use body language in much the same way that any silent movie actor would. Watching the images on screen, it is possible to tell when the characters are threatening, pleading, celebrating or courting. Frustration and timidity are there to be seen. It is all in the gestures.

The settings for the action in Prince Achmed also show extraordinary fluidity. Reiniger is able to achieve great variety in her recreations. We see dancers, a man on a flying horse amidst the skies and clouds, a fight with a serpent, a volcano and a seascape. In one scene, the Fire Mountain Witch has a fight-to-the-death with the African Sorcerer, and both rivals constantly transform into different creatures.

Lotte Reiniger drew on The Thousand Nights and One Night for aspects of her story, especially the story-within-the-story about Aladdin. The tale opens with the evil African Sorcerer who is able to conjure up a number of animals from random shapes. The Sorcerer appears as an entertainer for the Caliph’s birthday. He performs magic tricks, but the most eye-catching of these is the creation of a flying horse.

In a scene that presumably inspired a similar moment in the 1940 fantasy, The Thief of Bagdad, the Caliph swears by Allah that the Sorcerer can have anything in exchange for the horse. The Sorcerer responds by asking to marry the Caliph’s daughter. Prince Achmed (her brother) objects, but the Sorcerer persuades the prince to try out the flying horse.

Unable to work out how to cause the horse to descend, Achmed floats off into the sky and is lost. Perhaps it was an accident. Perhaps it was a deliberate attempt to get Achmed out of the way so that the Sorcerer can marry his sister. Perhaps it was to punish Achmed’s father for not immediately consenting. Whatever the reason, the Sorcerer is arrested.

Eventually Achmed works out how to make the horse descend, but by now he is thoroughly lost. He lands on the magic island of Waq-Waq, where decadent and lusty maidservants fight over him. Though he seems to enjoy the attention, he does not stay long. Then he lands at the magic lake of the princess, Pari Banu. She and her servants can fly using a coat of feathers, but to Achmed’s delight they shed their feathers (and everything else) to bathe in the lake.

Soon he asks her to marry him, and they flee from the Land of Spirits. However the evil Sorcerer escapes his bonds by transforming into a bat. The Sorcerer traps Achmed in a ravine while he takes back his horse, and also abducts Pari Banu. She is sold in slavery to the lecherous Chinese Emperor who wishes to marry her.

It is at this point that Achmed meets the most extraordinary character in the story. This is the Fire Mountain Witch. She seems initially menacing to this intruder, and her appearance in outline is forbidding. She looks like a stunted caveman, and it would be easier to imagine her as the witch in the Hansel and Gretel story.

Nonetheless this hag proves to be a surprisingly loyal ally who helps Achmed throughout the rest of the tale. She is admittedly governed by hatred of the Sorcerer, but she says a fond farewell to the lovers at the end of the story, so she presumably has sparks of goodness in her.

With her help, Achmed rescues Pari Banu from the clutches of the Emperor, only to see the Sorcerer kidnap her once again. The Sorcerer takes her to a mountain which closes behind them, and can only be reopened with the help of Aladdin’s lamp. This involves an excursion to visit Aladdin, who tells the story of how he lost the lamp.

We can guess the rest. The lamp will be recovered, and the Sorcerer vanquished. Nonetheless the final battle with the Spirits who pour out of the mountain in seemingly-endless profusion is an exciting one.

Throughout its running time, the movie retains the naivety of the fairy tale with no ambiguity or hidden meanings. Reiniger inserts no deliberate subtext into the action. However the fantastical nature of the story reels out in a dream-like state, and it is possible for us to see meanings that were not consciously or deliberately placed in the film.

I find myself noticing the peculiar sexual hints that are subtly expressed in the film. Prince Achmed enjoys flirting with the women of Waq-Waq, and he takes a voyeuristic pleasure in watching Pari Banu as she bathes naked. Later the Chinese Emperor will view his new slave with obvious lust too.

The film is also guilty of exoticism, the portrayal of other cultures as alien, mysterious or evil. The film is made by a European, yet the evil sorcerer is African and the unpleasant Emperor is Chinese. Set against this, the hero of the movie is a Muslim from the Middle East, something we do not often see today.

In Reiniger’s defence, if she chooses to base the film’s magical ideas in the world of Arabic culture, this is not something that westerners have imposed on another region of the world. On the contrary, Reiniger has taken elements directly from the Thousand Nights and One Night, a work that was written in Arabic in the first place.

If The Adventures of Prince Achmed is as good as I say it is, then why is it not better-known today? There are a number of reasons. Lotte Reiniger’s career in cinema was short. She was forced to flee Nazi Germany due to her left-wing views. As a result, many of her works are lost, and we are lucky to have Prince Achmed. The negative and complete copy of the work is still missing, and what we have is a reconstruction of Reiniger’s work.

Perhaps the other difficulty is that animation is a field that dates more rapidly than any other cinematic genre. Audiences demand that cartoons should look increasingly naturalistic, even though their content remains unreal. Reiniger makes no attempt to produce figures that are more than adequately convincing, and I doubt that she had the means to do so if she wanted to. This also added to the short-lived nature of her career in making films. Her style had been superseded by animators of a different kind.

Personally I believe that there is no necessity for fantasy to convince us that it is true. It is by its very nature a suspension of disbelief. The pleasure of watching The Adventures of Prince Achmed today is that it allows scope for the mind to fill in the imaginative gaps in the story. The animation may be primitive by today’s standards, but it has a charm and beauty that does not exist in a pixelated world where everything is recreated by a computer.

The skill and ingenuity of digital effects produced today can yield some truly amazing results, and I will not dismiss them. Nonetheless I can still admire the meticulous hand-crafted work of this early pioneer of animation.