Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #18331 in DVD
• Released on: 2001-07-23
• Rating: Parental Guidance
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Formats: Animated, PAL, Silent
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 126 minutes

Special Features
Region 2
English

Synopsis
Considered by many to be the first full-length animated film, the story of Lotte Reiniger's mesmerizing work is taken from THE ARABIAN NIGHTS. A young prince embarks on a series of great adventures, including uniting with Aladdin and the Witch of the Fiery Mountains to save a beautiful princess. Produced in Germany this color-tinted film utilizes laboriously cut out silhouettes to tell its story.

Customer Reviews

A defining example of the unique art of animation.
The Adventures of Prince Achmed by Berlin avant-gardist Lotte Reiniger was one of the world's first feature-length animated films and premièred in 1926 (with Fritz Lang in the audience!). Employing her unsurpassed silhouette techniques, Reiniger hand-cut and crafted each individual image in this story based on The Arabian Nights. Assisted by husband producer/photographer Carl Koch and fellow animators Berthold Bartosch and Walter Ruttmann, the film took a painstaking 3 years and 300,000 camera shots to complete.
Sadly, much of Reiniger's unique work, including the original negative of this film, was destroyed in Berlin at the end of World War II. However, a nitrate positive had been preserved in the archives of the BFI (British Film Insitute) and, in 1999, 100 years after the birth of Reiniger, new prints were made from it and the original film restored. Fortunately too, Wolfgang Zeller's original music score had been preserved in the Library of Congress, Washington.
To this day it remains timeless, classic, sophisticated, poetic, delicate, magical... a defining example of the unique art of animation.

An entertainment of shadows
Lotte Reiniger made this enchanting film with a small team, frame by painstaking frame. The characters and scenery remain shadows against tinted backgrounds - it plays like the dream shadow-theatre that you could never have actually made yourself. The stories, adapted from the Arabian Nights, are exciting and absorbing as well for young children, a little tiresome for adults, though Jean Renoir called this 'a masterpiece'. On this DVD we also get a well-made and thoughtful documentary on Reiniger which outlines her biography, has interviews with relatives and experts, and - best of all - contains many beautiful clips from her other shadow films which I hope will be released soon.

Watch it with incense!
This is a remarkable film; made in 1926 by a handful of people under the direction of Lotte Reiniger, ten years before Disney's 'Snow White', this is the first animated feature film still in existence - and we can count ourselves lucky, since the original negatives were all lost in the war. Told in lovingly crafted silhouetted, with a first-class orchestral score, this is an engaging, magical adventure with echoes of the Arabian Nights and Chinese shadow theatre - modern kids might find it heavy going but the child in the rest of us should love it if we give it a chance. Beautiful and atmospheric, with a finely told dramatic story, this is a delightful film and the BFI have done a superb job in rescuing it from the archives and restoring it. Turn the lights down, take the phone off the hook, light some joss sticks and enjoy something quite unique.