More than a decade before Snow White first flitted across the screen in Walt Disney’s seminal feature-length animated film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), a young woman in Germany produced her own animated feature. Rather than hand-drawn animated cels, however, this woman’s film was made with silhouettes, using a technique that she herself had devised that allowed for seamless movement onscreen. The film, featuring hand-tinted frames in glorious, full-blown color, took the young woman more than three years to make, and her meticulous efforts resulted in one of the earliest feature-length animated films. To this day, it remains the earliest animated feature to survive the ravages of time and unreliable nitrate stock.

The woman who labored over that film, Lotte Reiniger, is not particularly well-known outside of animation circles. And it’s a shame, because her work is just as thoughtful, just as lovingly rendered as anything her male counterparts were producing in Hollywood and around the world at the time. That first feature, The Adventures of Prince Achmed, initially released in Europe in 1926, was a groundbreaking effort, marked by some of the most creative visual storytelling the film world had yet to see. And most remarkably of all, Reiniger did it all when she was barely in her twenties.

It would not be an overstatement to label Lotte Reiniger a “prodigy.” As a child, she was influenced by the longtime Chinese tradition of shadow plays, a form of entertainment in which jointed figures constructed out of leather are “animated” using sticks to move them. The enterprising young Reiniger decided to put on her own shows for which she built her own shadow theater, constructing her figures out of paper. 

In later years, this artistic talent was put to use when German director Paul Wegener hired the young woman—who was, at the time, ostensibly studying to become an actress—to create some silhouette figures for the intertitles of two of his films. While working for Wegener, Reiniger contributed some of her own ideas to the film: when Wegener’s animal actors refused to cooperate during the filming of his version of the Pied Piper of Hamelin (1918), Reiniger proposed that she animate some rats for him instead.

The success of that sequence meant that, in short order, Reiniger was in demand with some of Europe’s most notable directors. But though she continued to create animated scenes for various live-action films, all while directing her own animated short subjects, her main focus was on her own work, and her desire to craft a full-length film in her signature silhouetted style. And between 1923 and 1926, most of her efforts were directed solely toward the realization of that goal.

Reiniger’s favorite subjects were fairy tales, and being of German heritage, she had a large and fruitful tradition of such tales to choose from when planning her work—and indeed, a number of the short films she created were based on stories collected by the Brothers Grimm (Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel, Snow White and Rose Red). But Reiniger also explored the traditional tales of many cultures in her work, from her adaptation of Englishman Hugh Lofting’s popular Dr. Dolittle, to the fanciful stories of Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen, to her Arabian Nights-influenced take on Aladdin.

It was this last source—Arabian Nights, also known as One Thousand and One Nights—that served as the inspiration for Reiniger’s most enduring work, the aforementioned feature-length triumph The Adventures of Prince Achmed. The movie tells the story of a young prince who embarks on a magical adventure through the machinations of a cunning magician with a flying horse. The prince’s tale is conflated with that of Aladdin, who is saved by Achmed after his own troubles in dealing with the magician. With the help of a powerful witch, Achmed and Aladdin set out on a rescue mission to save Achmed’s royal lady love from certain death.

Creating the film meant exploring new means with which Reiniger could tell the story. Her goal was to make her animation seem less static than that of other contemporary animators; she sought to build an animated world of depth and beauty, a lively film that transcended the limits of the two-dimensional screen. But the technology needed to do so had not yet been invented.

So Lotte Reiniger took it upon herself to invent it. The result was something Reiniger christened a “Tricktisch,” an early version of the multiplane camera (a design that would be perfected by Disney animator Ub Iwerks a few years later, ultimately allowing Disney to lay claim to the patent for the device). The device essentially allowed for a greater sense of depth, creating a sort of three-dimensional effect in the animation. This filming process allowed the backgrounds to appear more prevalent, not oppressively flat as in other animated scenes; the characters were part of their environment, as opposed to merely moving across a static landscape. Reiniger’s efforts in this respect were aided greatly through her collaboration with another German director, Walter Ruttman, who crafted the lush, sometimes abstracted backdrops for the film, further enhancing that all-important impression of depth.

But it is in the animation of the characters where the true effectiveness of Reiniger’s style shines through, for these faceless fairy-tale creatures are nonetheless rife with kinetic energy, bounding across the screen dynamically. The characters stand starkly against the hand-tinted color backgrounds, their mysterious faces sometimes lit by the whiteness of an eyeball but otherwise largely featureless. And yet, for all the generalized nature of their silhouetted figures, the characters are skillfully and gorgeously animated to convey emotion, telling an unparalleled tale of passion and verve in shadowed flickers on the screen.

Three years and more than a quarter of a million frames later, Prince Achmed was complete, a testament to the dedication and determination of one seriously talented young animator. The film, released in 1926, was quite popular, and Reiniger gained many admirers among her cinematic peers, among them French director Jean Renoir, who praised the “magic hands” that had created the beautiful film.

As popular as Achmed became, Reiniger’s often painstaking and precise methods were not widely adopted by the animation industry. Cel animation became the norm, especially with the release of Snow White, with silhouette animation remaining Reiniger’s own unique niche. Perhaps that is just as well, for no one did it better than she, with all the lyricism and poetry that her skillful renderings were able to convey onscreen.

And while Achmed was undoubtedly Reiniger’s masterpiece, she was far from done. Her career spanned another five decades, in which she formed her own production company and produced numerous short fairy-tale adaptations for the BBC and others, before she passed away in 1981 at the age of eighty-two.

Reiniger’s legacy—though not as widespread as she inarguably deserves—remains in her influential work, particularly the feature to which she dedicated so much of her time. Though all of the original nitrate prints of the film were lost or destroyed over the years, Achmed was at long last restored to its former glory in the late 1990s using a copy of the original print. Not only was the film cleaned up, but the original color tints were restored to the film, and a new version of Wolfgang Zeller’s lovely and haunting score was recorded to accompany the crisp new print of the movie. Thanks to the restoration team (and periodic screenings on Turner Classic Movies), new generations of fans have been able to discover Lotte Reiniger’s stunning masterwork for themselves, ensuring that her well-deserved status as a true pioneer of animation lives on.

Brandie Ashe no longer eats cold cereal while wearing footy pajamas...but does maintain a love for all things animated. She is one of four passionate classic film authors at True Classics.