Ah, ladies, you’re charming but … two-dimensional.
The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) is a version of the tale known to most Americans as Aladdin and the Lamp. but wherein Aladdin is a supporting character.
Prince Achmed is tricked into mounting a mechanical flying horse provided by the Evil Sorcerer. Upon proof that it does fly, Caliph offers anything in his kingdom for the horse; the Evil Sorcerer selects Princess Dinarsade.
The horse then conveys Achmed away on an uncontrollable and wondrous voyage to Wak-Wak, an island ruled by the beautiful Pari Banu. The Prince, entranced, presses himself upon her until she finally relents.
Meanwhile, the father of Prince Achmed, the Caliph, places the Sorcerer in chains, but these are nothing to an Evil Sorcerer, and, escaping, he takes Dinarsade away in pursuit of Achmed.
Achmed, and this all gets confusing in retrospect, loses Pari Banu to the Sorcerer and is trapped. While the Sorcerer takes Pari to China and sells her to the Emperor, the Sorcerer’s arch-enemy, the Witch, frees Achmed; Achmed rescues Aladdin from a monster, and it turns out Aladdin, who has a magical lamp, is secretly married to Princess Dinarsade.
Then it’s just a matter of taking care of the Evil Sorcerer and getting home.
It all sounds a bit silly, but it’s actually rather fascinating because this is allegedly, and subject to future cinematic discoveries, the earliest surviving animated film, and the fifth (another source claims third) animated film ever made. It was constructed using the silhouette animation technique, resulting in a shadow effect in which living things are portrayed in black, while background and buildings are in various shades of the dominant color.
The effect captures the eye, and the efforts of the artists involved, these being the director Lotte Reiniger, and animators Walter Ruttmann, Berthold Bartosch, Carl Koch, and others, are sometimes amazing; they had my Arts Editor exclaiming with delight. This alone makes it worth tracking down a print for viewing.
Speaking of prints, the principals of this film are German, and, it being quite an old movie, it’s a silent movie. The expository intertitles are in German.
We viewed a German-only version of The Adventures of Prince Achmed first, and found it a bit mystifying, as neither of us are fluent, or even knowledgeable, in German. Then we viewed a version with English captions, and it really brought the story to light for us, as if an extra light source had been added to the film.
Metaphorically, that’s exactly what happened.
This seems to be the English print we viewed. Enjoy!
