Last Wednesday we were assigned to groups of six to work on live-action shadow puppet films lasting no longer than around a minute in length.
The mention of shadow puppetry and silhouette animation instantly brought to my mind Lotte Reiniger, an animator who created arguably the first feature length animated film over a decade before Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937).
Though our shadow puppet films were filmed in real time as opposed to stop-motion cut-out animation under panes of glass, The Adventures of Prince Achmed is an unsung treasure of silent era animation and one of the most important films of the medium. Lacking any spoken dialogue (it was completed in 1922, after all) and being set in an Arabian Knights fantasy world, the entire piece feels like an early ancestor to films such as The Thief and the Cobbler and Aladdin, although Prince Achmed feels far closer in tone and aesthetics to The Thief and the Cobbler. There is also a parallel in the creators of each film being emigres to Britain and working for the rest of their lives in the British animation industry; Lotte Reiniger left Germany in the early 1930s for reasons that become obvious if you know just what was going on in that country at that time, and Richard Williams came from Canada, moving to London in the mid-1950s.
Prince Achmed is not Reiniger’s only achievement – she also created animation for a variety of silent era commercials and her career in Britain was spent creating adaptations of popular fairy tales and Biblical stories in her signature silhouette style.
A dual DVD Blu-Ray edition of Prince Achmed and a collection of her fairy tale films are available from the BFI, both of which I own.