Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed [The Adventures of Prince Achmed] (1926)

(Criterion Streaming, November 2019) Now here’s a fascinating discovery — The Adventures of Prince Achmed is known as the oldest surviving animated feature film, and it predates the more familiar Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs by a good eleven years. The animation style makes clever use of limited technical means by consisting of moving cardboard/lead sheets over an illuminated background—a technique that has a lot more to do with modern Flash animation than more traditional drawn techniques. The story is inspired by Arabic-influenced One Thousand and One Nights tales, proving that the association between animation and fantasy fairytales impossible to render in live-action is really not a new one. By accident or design, you can find similarities between this film and many successors, whether it’s Disney films like The Sword and the Stone (with a climactic battle between shapeshifting sorcerers), Aladdin (which explicitly pays homage to it through a “Prince Achmed” character) or newer use of silhouette-style animation in films such as Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1. It’s understandably rough as a movie considering the primitive means at writer-director Lotte Reiniger’s disposal, but the film is still beautiful, intricate and absorbing. It’s well worth tracking down—The Adventures of Prince Achmed hasn’t aged nearly as much as most other films from the 1920s.