Eleven years before Walt Disney came up with its first animated feature film, The Adventures of Prince Achmed was made. The Adventures of Prince Achmed isn’t the first animated feature film made, but it is the oldest surviving animated film. Two other films, The Apostle and Without a Trace by Quirino Cristiani are considered to be lost.
The film uses Silhouette animation technique where the characters and other things appear dark while the background is light in color. The director of the film explains about how she animated her film using this Silhouette technique –
“…The technique of this type of film is very simple. As with cartoon drawings, the silhouette films are photographed movement by movement. But instead of using drawings, silhouette marionettes are used. These marionettes are cut out of black cardboard and thin lead, every limb being cut separately and joined with wire hinges. A study of natural movement is very important, so that the little figures appear to move just as men and women and animals do. But this is not a technical problem. The backgrounds for the characters are cut out with scissors as well, and designed to give a unified style to the whole picture. They are cut from layers of transparent paper.”
– Lotte Reiniger,Sight & Sound (1936).
The Adventures of Prince Achmed isn’t all about the effort put behind the animation and the technicalities. The story of the film is based upon the characters taken from different stories from the collection 1001 Arabian Nights and made into a fascinating tale on how Prince Achmed wins Princess Pari Banau from the evil African magician.
The film was full of imagination both in terms of story as well as the technique behind animation. Taking in different characters from different stories of Arabian Nights and making a good supernatural story with romance in it was a real treat. The film took 3 years to complete because of the animation technique, which required lots of effort to make the simple photographs of cardboard cutouts to appear in motion. The scenes are very much detailed and every movement is shown flawlessly and with lot of clarity. It was a lot more difficult to make the animation in those pre-computer days compared to today where we mostly make the animation digitally (I don’t mean digital animation is easy). It involved taking pictures of every frame of every movement a character or object is making and juxtapose them to make it appear in motion. Given that there are normally 25 frames a second, it means it required 25 different still photographs for every second of the film and putting them together with every photo differing very slightly from the previous one.
The importance of the film in the history of animation can well be compared to the importance Avatar is going to have in 3D motion pictures. It is a must watch for every animation film lover or even those who love supernatural stories like Aladin, etc. It might require patience as it is a very old animated film and the technologies have improved a lot since then, but I loved it as I saw a completely new form of animation which I was unaware of before. Also the runtime is just around 65 minutes, so it would not be too much of a problem. 🙂
To know more about the animation technique used refer to this link – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silhouette_animation
References – http://www.methodshop.com/video/reviews/prince-achmed/index.shtml
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