THE ADVENTURES OF PRINCE ACHMED

The Adventures of Prince Achmed is considered to be the first feature-length animation film made using the cut-out technique. The German Lotte Reiniger has made numerous films based on the movement of black images on luminous backgrounds with a careful study of music and ballet. In the film, the jointed silhouettes move according to the technique of shadow theatre, although in a different way. The director moves the shadows flat and the lighting is from above, while in Chinese shadows they are moved in a wave-like direction and the lighting is frontal. The Adventures of Prince Achmed is based on stories from Arabic literature, One Thousand and One Nights, specifically the story of Prince Achmed and the Fairy Tales of Peri Banu, described in The Blue Fairy Book by Andrew Lang. The adventures of Prince Achmed are divided into five acts, each with its own title. There are three settings: the city of the Caliph, the magical Waq Waq islands, and China, each distinguished by four different colours: blue, yellow, red and green. The black and white film was coloured by immersing the positives in a bath of colour.

The animated film consists of more than 300,000 images. It took Lotte Reiniger three years, from 1923 to 1926, to make it and achieve elasticity of movement.