Welcome back to another review from one of the featured Letterboxd Lists! This time around we look at an offering from the Top 250 Women Directed and number 70 on that list with…The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926).
Title: The Adventures of Prince Achmed
Director: Lotte Reiniger
Released: September 3, 1926 (Berlin)
Runtime: 1 hour and 6 minutes
Available to stream on: Kanopy and The Criterion Channel
What makes The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) impressive is that it is the oldest known feature-length animated film. That’s right, take a seat Disney, the honor belongs to Lotte Reiniger and the silhouette style of animation we get here.
This is a silent film based on the Arabian Knights stories. An African sorcerer conjures up a flying horse and rides it to the Caliph. When he lands, he refuses to sell the horse for any amount of gold. Desperate to get his hands on the horse, the Caliph decides to offer up any of his treasures in exchange. The sorcerer winds up choosing the Caliph’s daughter as his treasure. Her brother, Prince Achmed, is vehemently against this but the sorcerer convinces Achmed to just give the horse a test run.
Having no idea as to what he’s doing, Prince Achmed is at the mercy of the flying horse. By the time Achmed figures out how to control the horse, he is landing on the magical island of Wak-Wak. There he falls in love with a woman named Peri Banu and the pair fly away to China. What Prince Achmed isn’t aware of is that the entire army of War-Wak demons is hot on his trail.
Will Prince Achmed be able to save both the woman he loves and his sister?
The fact that we’re even able to view The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) is wild. At the very beginning of the film we learn that there are no original negatives or copies of the original German version of this film in existence anymore. What we see is based on a fragmented nitrate copy from London’s National Film and Television Archive, then the original German captions were inserted.
While the story itself isn’t anything revolutionary, it is a solid Arabian Knights-style story. But let’s be real, the animation itself is the real star here.
Not only did Lotte Reiniger write and direct, she was also responsible for the silhouette animation. Lotte accomplished this by cutting out the cardboard silhouettes and stringing them together with thread. In a sense, it is almost a form of stop-motion before stop-motion.
What makes it all the more impressive is that despite not having faces and there being no dialogue, the silhouettes are able to convey a ton of emotion and feeling through just their movements and actions. I can only imagine how impressive this had to be to see and experience nearly 100 years ago.
If your local library uses Kanopy, definitely seek this out. If it doesn’t, sign up for a free one week trial to The Criterion Channel and give The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) at least one viewing.
So, if you have seen The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926), what are your thoughts on it?
Leave a comment below or reach out to me on Bluesky and let me hear it!
As always, you can follow along with every movie that I watch over on Letterboxd.