Studio: Comenius-Film GmbH
Short Synopsis
An African sorcerer conjures a flying horse and offers it to the Caliph, but he asks for the Caliph's daughter, Dinarsade, in payment. Her brother, Prince Achmed, objects; the sorcerer tricks him into mounting the horse, which carries him off into the sky. Achmed learns to steer it and lands on the magical island of Wak Wak, where he takes the feather robe of its ruler, the bird-maiden Pari Banu, while she bathes. He returns it, wins her trust, and they fall in love. The sorcerer, escaped from prison, turns himself into a bat to track them, kidnaps Pari Banu and sells her to the Emperor of China, and leaves Achmed pinned under a boulder on a mountain. The Witch of the Flaming Mountain, the sorcerer's sworn enemy, frees him. Along the way Achmed is joined by Aladdin and his magic lamp, and the witch and the sorcerer fight a duel of transformations. In the end the demons of Wak Wak are defeated, the sorcerer is destroyed, and Achmed and Pari Banu return home together.
Why It Matters
- Every figure is a black silhouette cut from card and thin lead, moved under the camera frame by frame against coloured, tinted backgrounds. The witch and sorcerer's shape-shifting duel and the swirling demons of Wak Wak are as fluid as anything in later cel animation.
- It is the oldest surviving animated feature film; the two earlier features by Quirino Cristiani in Argentina are lost. Reiniger and her team took three years to make it, and they used an early form of the multiplane camera, a device later made famous by Disney, to give the scenes depth.
Notes and Trivia
- The avant-garde filmmakers Walter Ruttmann and Berthold Bartosch worked on the effects and backgrounds; Reiniger's husband, Carl Koch, ran the camera.
- The tinting was restored in 1999 from a nitrate print held by the British Film Institute.
- See also: The Clown and His Donkey (1910), an earlier silhouette film.