You don’t, in the normal run of things, expect a rape scene in old-time animation, but that’s what you get in 1926’s The Adventures of Prince Achmed, the breakthrough for Lotte Reiniger, a pioneer in her field, artistically and technically.
It tells the story of the an eastern prince who steps in to help his sister after an ugly African sorcerer makes a play for her. For his trouble the brother is whisked away on a magic flying horse, to a faraway realm where Princess Pari Banu, ruler of the spirit world of Wak Wak, beguiles him with her naked beauty. And he responds with the aforesaid rape. Unless I am very much mistaken – there is some room for disagreement here.
From here, more trouble for the Princess, who is abducted by the jealous sorcerer and sold to a Chinese emperor, who treats her shabbily, at one point handing her over to his jester for what looks like more abusive treatment.
Reiniger’s characters are all cut from black cardboard by hand and her story is told entirely in silhouette, so the rape and the other cases of sexual impropriety might well be figments of an overactive imagination, or possibly entirely intentional.
This is not the sort of thing you get in Disney. But other things are familiar. If you’ve seen Disney’s Aladdin, for example, you’ve seen the influence of Reiniger’s 1926 film. It features a Prince Achmed and also leans towards her visual style a touch. Just a touch.
This is the earliest surviving feature-length animation, and was made two years before Walt Disney got going with Plane Crazy and Steamboat Willy. Reiniger also got to the multiplane camera before Disney too. In fact she invented it while making this film, using layers of stacked glass to create depth effects. It’s really effective even to this day.
Considering where we are in 1926, and what with all the innovation going on, you might expect visual and narrative simplicity. But Reiniger’s figures are astonishingly detailed, filigree work, and her storyline is similarly complex, and as well as the sorcerer, a flying horse, Prince Achmed and Princess Pari Banu, there’s a caliph, Achmed’s sister, a witch, the Chinese emperor and his jester, demons, a giant snake, handsome Aladin and his magic lamp, a genie, a huge monster and a floating palace to be squeezed into the 80-minute running time.
There is also, if you select it, a narrator fleshing out the story with extra detail. Kids might benefit from it but it isn’t entirely necessary for adults.
Though now considered a classic, Reiniger’s film had a hard time of it getting taken up by distributors, who didn’t know quite how to market it. Luckily, she had influential friends, including Fritz Lang and Bertolt Brecht, and after a few private screenings to the 1920s equivalents of influencers, the word started to get around.
That original German movie is now lost and the restoration you will in all likelihood be watching is from the English version, which has had its intertitles translated back into German, and so looks pretty much as good as the day Brecht and Lang eyeballed it.
Silhouettes don’t sound like the ideal vehicle for subtlety, but thanks to Reiniger’s virtuosic scissorwork, and the impressive use of the multiplane camera by her husband Carl Koch, the foregrounds are populated by the main players while the backgrounds teem with ancillary life and detail. Prince Achmed flies not just on a winged horse but in the face of expectation.
In 1926 people didn’t expect to see either a feature-length animation that wasn’t a comedy. Prince Achmed was a huge gamble. One that paid off for Reiniger, who worked solidly until 1980 and whose influence can still be seen everywhere.
The Adventures of Prince Achmed – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
