The Adventures of Prince Achmend

The Adventures of Prince Achmed (Template:Lang-de) is a 1926 German animated fairytale film by Lotte Reiniger. It is the oldest surviving animated feature film; two earlier ones were made in Argentina by Quirino Cristiani, but they are considered lost. The Adventures of Prince Achmed features a silhouette animation technique Reiniger had invented which involved manipulated cutouts made from cardboard and thin sheets of lead under a camera. The technique she used for the camera is similar to Wayang shadow puppets, though hers were animated frame by frame, not manipulated in live action. The original prints featured color tinting.

Several famous avant-garde animators worked on this film with Lotte Reiniger, among them Walter Ruttmann, Berthold Bartosch, and Carl Koch.

The story is based on elements taken from the One Thousand and One Nights, specifically "The Story of Prince Ahmed and the Fairy Paribanou" featured in Andrew Lang's Blue Fairy Book.

Plot

An African magician (der afrikanische Zauberer) conjures up a flying horse, which he shows to the Caliph. When the magician refuses to sell it for any amount of gold, the Caliph offers any treasure he has. The magician chooses Dinarsade, the Caliph's daughter, to her great distress. Prince Achmed, Dinarsade's brother, objects, but the magician persuades him to try out the horse. It carries the prince away, higher and higher into the sky, as he does not know how to control it. The Caliph has the magician imprisoned.

Peri Banu (center) with her attendants, preparing to bathe.

When Achmed discovers how to make the horse descend, he finds himself in a strange foreign land. He is greeted by a bevy of attractive women. When they begin fighting for his attention, he flies away to a lake. There, he watches as Peri Banu, the beautiful ruler of the land of Wak Wak, arrives with her attendants to bathe. When they spot him, they all fly away, except for Peri Banu, for Achmed has her magical flying feather costume. She flees on foot, but he captures her. He gains her trust when he returns her feathers. They fall in love. She warns him, however, that the demons of Wak Wak will try to kill him.

The magician frees himself from his chains. Transforming himself into a bat, he seeks out Achmed. The prince chases the magician (back in human form) and falls into a pit. While Achmed fights a giant snake, the magician takes Peri Banu to China and sells her to the Emperor. The magician returns and pins Achmed under a boulder on top of a mountain. However, the Witch (die Hexe) of the Flaming Mountain notices him. The magician is her arch-enemy, so she helps Achmed rescue Peri Banu from the Emperor.

Then the demons of Wak Wak find the couple and, despite Achmed's fierce resistance, carry Peri Banu off. Achmed forces a captive demon to fly him to Wak Wak. However, the gates of Wak Wak are locked. He then slays a monster attacking Aladdin.

Aladdin tells of how he, a poor tailor, was recruited by the magician to retrieve a magic lamp from a cave. When Aladdin returned to the cave entrance, the magician demanded the lamp before letting him out. Aladdin refused, so the magician sealed him in. Aladdin accidentally released one of the genies of the lamp and ordered it to take him home. He then courted and married Dinarsade. One night, Dinarsade, Aladdin's magnificent palace and the lamp disappeared. Blamed by the Caliph, Aladdin fled to avoid being executed. A storm at sea cast him ashore at Wak Wak. When he tried to pluck fruit from a "tree", it turned into a monster and grabbed him, but Achmed killed it.

Then the witch arrives. Since only the lamp can open the gates, she agrees to attack the magician to get it. They engage in a magical duel, each transforming into various creatures. After a while, they resume their human forms and fling fireballs at each other. Finally, the witch slays the magician. With the lamp, they are able to enter Wak Wak, just in time to save Peri Banu from being thrown to her death. A fierce battle erupts. A demon steals the lamp, but the witch gets it back. She summons creatures from the lamp who defeat the demons. One hydra-like creature seizes Peri Banu. When Achmed cuts off one of its heads, two more grow back immediately, but the witch stops this regeneration, allowing Achmed to kill it. A flying palace then settles to the ground. Inside, Aladdin finds Dinarsade. The two couples bid goodbye to the witch and fly home in the palace.

Production

Reiniger required several years, from 1923 to 1926, to make this film. Each frame had to be painstakingly filmed, and 24 frames were needed per second.

Restoration

No original German nitrate prints of the film are known to still exist. While the original film featured color tinting, prints available just prior to the restoration had all been in black and white.  Working from surviving nitrate prints, German and British archivists restored the film during 1998 and 1999 including reinstating the original tinted image by using the Desmet method.

Availability

The film is screened fairly often on Turner Classic Movies.  English-market DVDs are available, distributed by Milestone Films and available in NTSC R1 (from Image) and PAL R2 (from the BFI).   Both versions of the DVD are identical.  They feature both an English-subtitled version (the intertitles are in German) and an English voice-over.

Score

The original score was composed by German composer Wolfgang Zeller in direct collaboration with the animation of the film. Reiniger created photograms for the orchestras, which were common in better theatres of the time, to follow along the action.

The Silk Road Ensemble accompanied the film with a live improvised performance on Western strings and instruments such as the oud, ney and sheng in October 2006 at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York, NY. The Silk Road Ensemble repeated the performance at the Avon Cinema in Providence, Rhode Island, in February 2007.