Process & Production: Lotte Reiniger - The Adventures of Prince Achmed

 
Here is a clip from the classic animated film The Adventures of Prince Achmed by Lotte Reiniger - being one of the first animated film to be made and not lost. I watched this on recommendation from a friend before knowing how old it actually was and I thought it was really impressive. I guessed it was from around the 1940s but when I did a little research into it and found out it was made two decades earlier I was mind-blown. This was made in 1926 when animated filmmaking was very limited. 
I think the film is beautiful; the animation is phantasmagoric and the score really brings it all together. It features a silhouette animation technique Lotte had invented herself which involved manipulated cutouts made from cardboard and thin sheets of lead under a camera taking from 1923 to 1926 to make. 
I'm amazed at the many details she put into this - take that moment when the witch-master looks at himself in the mirror. It's just a tiny detail, but it brings so much to the character. I think the fact that it is in colour shows how much effort went into making the film. Lotte would have used the very early method of color tinting, where they photograph it in black-and-white and then paint the color directly onto the film with dye. I can image every frame would have been painstakingly made but all the effort gone into this has made an animation that will forever go down in history.