Family Fun Matinee!
THE ADVENTURES OF PRINCE ACHMED (1926)
As visually staggering today as it must have been on its release 98 years ago (!!!), Lotte Reiniger’s The Adventures of Prince Achmed is the oldest surviving animated feature film…and it’s a doozy, sure to stagger all newcomers, adults and children alike.
Visionary in oh-so-many ways, Reineger’s film is based on several tales from Hanna Diyab’s One Thousand and One Nights, featuring all sorts of visual conjuring, such as flying horses, magical transformations, demons, witches, hydras and so much more.
Reiniger invented a silhouette animation technique that involved manipulated cutouts made from cardboard and thin sheets of lead under a camera. She also used the first multiplane camera, one of the most important devices in pre digital animation.
The film also offers a very, very early cinematic gay relationship between the Emperor of China and his companion Ping Pong. Much of this content was removed by government censors at the time, but the implication is quite clear, and Reineiger liked it that way.
“I knew lots of homosexual men and women from the film and theater world in Berlin, and saw how they suffered from stigmatization,” Reiniger said in an interview. “I suspect that when the Emperor kisses Ping Pong, that must have been the first happy kiss between two men in the cinema and I wanted it to happen quite calmly in the middle of Prince Achmed so children — some who would be homosexual and some who would not — could see it as a natural occurrence, and not be shocked or ashamed.”