On the day when in the city the birthday celebrations for the great caliph are being held, the powerful sorcerer appears and presents the marvel he has created: a horse that can fly through the skies. The caliph would like to have this magic horse by all means, but in exchange he is to give his charming daughter Dinarsade to the ugly sorcerer to be his wife. This angers Dinarsade’s brother Ahmed, and he chases the intruder away. The sorcerer, however, finds a way of luring the prince onto the fateful horse. Thus begins Achmed’s adventurous journey. While the sorcerer is put in chains, the horse with the horrified prince on its back rises in the air, into the starry sky. Finally, the prince discovers the lever that propels the horse downwards, and they land on the island of Wak Wak. The island is the home of the beautiful Pari Banu, ruler of Wak Wak, whom Prince Achmed immediately falls in love with and carries off to distant lands on his magic horse.

The sorcerer has in the meantime plotted revenge, and soon enough he succeeds a second time in playing a dirty trick on the unsuspecting prince. He steals Pari Banu and offers her as a slave to the emperor of China. She rebuffs all advances, thus incurring the imperial wrath. As punishment she is to be married to the emperor’s hunchbacked servant. The intiring sorcerer, on the other hand, has taken Prince Achmed off to a desolate volcanic area and bound him to an huge boulder inside of which, however, the sorcerer’s powerful enemy, the good witch Von Flammenberg lives. She rushes together with Achmed to the emperor’s court, where he succeeds in saving his beloved from the impending wedding. Soon a new disaster appears on the horizon: The demons from the magic island demand the return of their queen, Pari Banu is again carried off, and Achmed again finds himself on his way to Wak Wak. All attempts to regain the abducted woman are to no avail. The gates of Wak wak close before the unhappy prince and will only open for that person who possesses the magic lamp of Aladdin.

As if by a miracle, Prince Achmed encounters Aladdin in front of the gates and frees him from the clutches of the octopus-like monster. He learns how Aladdin came in possession of the miraculous lamp and that Dinarsade, Achmed’s sister, became Aladdin’s wife. However, the evil sorcerer, who also wanted to have possession of the magic lamp, made the palace disappear that the spirits in the lamp had built for Aladdin. In the middle of the story the good witch comes storming in bearing the news that Pari Banu is being tormented by the enraged demons because she has followed her lover Prince Achmed. Aladdin and Achmed are desperate without the power of the magic lamp, which in the meantime is in the hands of the sorcerer, they cannot make to Wak wak. Finally, there is the all-decisive battle between the witch and the sorcerer. In the end, the good witch defeats the evil sorcerer, and with the magic lamp Achmed, Aladdin and the witch force their way into Wak wak. Pari Banu is freed in a fierce battle with the demons, and at the end the grieving caliph can joyously take his children in his arms again.

With The Adventures of Prince Achmed Lotte Reiniger created the first full-length feature animated film in the history of the cinema. The technical and aesthetic aspects of this film genre had already been developed to cinematic perfection in the 20s. Her style continued the tradition of shadow plays performed in China, which she expanded through the technical possibilities offered by the cinema.

The film The Adventures of Prince Achmed was the result of three years of a team working together: Lotte Reiniger drew up the storyboard, cut out the figures and the background sceneries and designed the characters’ movements, with the assistance of Alexander Kardan and Walter Türk. Her husband Carl Koch functioned as location manager and supervised the technical aspects, Walther Ruttmann experimented with the possibilities of cinematic design and created the battle of the demons of Wak wak, and Berthold Bartosch constructed the movements of the waves for the storm at sea which the fleeing Aladdin gets caught in.

Lotte Reiniger herself related the history leading up to this bold film project and the necessary dramaturgical considerations in her very personal and humorous way: “For centuries Prince Achmed together with his magic horse had led a comfortable existence as a fairy-tale figure in the tales of the Thousand and One Nights and was loved, happy and contented. One day he was roused from this peaceful state when a film company got the idea to use his adventures and many others from the same source in an animated film. For this purpose he, as well as many of his unfortunate colleagues from other branches of literature who share with him the same fate, had to be “reborn”. And indeed more thoroughly than this otherwise is commonly the case with film adaptations, where the producer tries to find actors and actresses who fit the character that the story is all about and gives them their parts. For this is supposed to be a silhouette film, because the film-maker who was obsessed by this idea, manely me, can’t do anything else but make silhouette films… . Up to then films like these that I had made were only ten minutes long, but the adventures of this Prince Achmed were supposed to last for more than an hour, and thus many other motifs from the rich treasure of The Thousand and One Nights had to serve as a source for the manuscript. First of all, Prince Achmed himself had to be physically invented, drawn, cut out, made movable, illuminated, moved and filmed. This then also happened in Berlin in the years from 1923 to 1926; this is how long it took until the film was completed. Why? Because for a film like this, 24 individual frames had to be recorded for every second. It is left to the algebraic abilities of the reader to calculate how many are then necessary for an opus of over a hour in length. And that’s not th only reason. As it turned out in the course of the work, new ideas also had to constantly be invented and triedout to determine if they were suitable for the fantastic plot. The longer the filming of Prince Achmed lasted, the more demanding became his desires. Back then animated film was still in its infancy, and Mickey Mouse had not been born yet. There were indeed, however, individual artists who were going their own way. “ (Lotte Reiniger. The Adventures of My Prince Achmed. London, 2 edition. Munich 1995)

The film reviews after the premiere in May 1926 reflect the reactions to the unusualness of the film’s style and design. The FILMKURIER of 3 May 1926 said this, for example: “ We are not used to silhouettes in films. Therefore, at the beginning we became somewhat tired. But gradually we are gripped with fascination and become more and more enthusiastic, delighted and enraptured.” And in the newspaper VORWÄRST of 9 May 1926 the following appeared: “When we consider that each of the figures acting in the film must be movable in all of their joints, … then we can get an approximate idea of what a marvel here has been achieved. But what matters is not just the technical aspect alone; the main thing is that in this cinematic sequence of images the spirit of fairy tales is born anew in the most successful manner and that the world of oriental miracles and fantastic happenings, one exhibiting the methods of a silhouette art developed according to Turkish and Japanese models, has been re-created.

In 1989 restoration work on The Adventures of Prince Achmed was completed by the German Film Museum in Frankfurt with the support of the London film producer Louis Hagen of Primrose Productions, whose father had founded the Comenius-Film company in the 20s and had financed the three-year film project The Adventures of Prince Achmed. For the 16 mm print, the lost German titles inserted in the film were reconstructed in contemporary script, and a new colour version was made according to the instructions received from Lotte Reiniger.

Christel Strobel

Production Country

Germany (DE)

Production Period

1923-1926

Production Year

1926

color

b/w

Aspect Ratio

1:1,33

Type

Silent Film, Animated Film

Genre

Fantasy / Fairy Tale

Topic

Love, Music

Target Group

Children’s film (0-6), Youth film (12-17), Junior film (7-11)

Available Media

Blu-ray Disc, DVD, DCP

Original Version

German (de)

Blu-ray Disc

Subtitles

Arabic (ar), Chinese (zh), French (fr), Spanish (es), Portuguese (Brazil) (pt), Russian (ru), English (en)

Other Languages

Intertitle

DVD

Subtitles

English (en), French (fr), Spanish (es), Portuguese (Brazil) (pt), Arabic (ar), Chinese (zh), Russian (ru)

Other Languages

Intertitle

Note on the Format

Aus der Lotte Reiniger DVD Edition

Länge Hauptfilm: 66 Min.

+ Extras / Bonusfilme: 52 Min.
- Der scheintote Chinese (1928),
- Aladin und die Wunderlampe / Aladin and the Magic Lamp (1954)
- Das Zauberpferd / The Magic Horse (1954)
- Interview mit Lotte Reiniger aus: Die Frau hinter den Schatten (ca. 18 Min.)

Dokumente: Zensurkarte, Filmplakat, Premiereneinladung, Fotogalerie, Kapiteleinteilung, Linkliste.
Der DVD liegt ein ausführliches Booklet bei.

DCP

Subtitles

English (en)

Other Languages

Intertitle

Note on the Format

Stummfilm.
Das DCP stammt vom DFF – Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum.
Das DCP ist eine Fassung OHNE Musik.