The Adventures of Prince Achmed | Absolutely amazing

The Adventures of Prince Achmed | Wonderful Animation!

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The Adventures of ...

	The Adventures of Prince Achmed Image Entertainment, 2002 average customer review:based on 16 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

The first full-length animated film is still hailed as an enchanting masterpiece and one of the great classics: beautiful, mesermizing, and utterly seductive! Director Lotte Reiniger creates pure cinematic magic with her hand-cut silhouettes and, with her elegant and intricate designs, brings characters vividly to life with a rare lyrical quality. Taken from "The Arabian Nights," the film tells the story of a wicked sorcerer who tricks Prince Achmed into mounting a magical flying horse which sends the rider off on a flight to his death. But the prince foils the evil plan and soars headlong into a series of wondrous adventures, joining forces with Aladdin and the Witch of the Fiery Mountains, doing battle with the sorcerer's army of monsters and demons, and falling in love with the bautiful Princess Peri Banu. Beautifully restored with its spectacular original color tinting and featuring a new orchestral recording of the magnificent original score, this dazzling adventure will enthrall children and film enthusiasts of all ages.

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Absolutely amazing

I don't really know why, but there's something about silhouette animation that's amazing to me. Maybe it's because it's so different from what I'm use to in terms of animation, such as CGI and cels. But no matter what the plot is, if I see a silhouette cartoon I have to sit through it.

I'm so happy I came upon 'The Adventures of Prince Achmed'. I enjoyed it just as much as I enjoyed any animated movie out on the market today. I didn't feel lost in the plot or bogged down by useless captions. Everything seemed to fit perfectly. Without sound and without facial expressions there isn't much to work with, but the body language of the silhouette puppets had me laughing and in tears at times. And when I found out that not only was this the oldest surviving animated feature in the world but Lotte Reiniger and her husband Carl painstakingly animated this over a 3 year period, I was even more enthralled.

This movie is a real treat and I recommend this to everyone. If you've never seen a silent silhouette animation before, it might take a while to get into. But believe me, this movie is certainly worth it.

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Wonderful Animation!

Wonderful animation and detailed character design! Action-packed and a very enjoyable plot. I don't know if Lotte Reiniger made other other movies of this type but I'll buy them if I learn of them. A must-see!

The oldest surviving animated feature film

Visiting last week the exhibition," The Société Anonyme: Modernism for America" at Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, I was very lucky to watch as a part of the exhibit Charlotte (Lotte) Reiniger's "Die Geschichte des Prinzen Achmed" (The Adventures of Prince Achmed"), completed in 1926, which makes it THE oldest surviving animated feature film. Lotte Reiniger (June 2, 1899 - June 19, 1981) was a German (and later a British) silhouette animator and film director. Through elaborating articulated paper silhouettes set to an original score by Wolfgang Zeller, Reiniger combines in "Prince Achmed..." several fairy tales from the Thousand and One Nights aka Arabian Nights. Reiniger was ahead of Walt Disney by a decade using her innovative camera which separates foreground from background to produce 3-D illusion. She also experimented with wax and sand to create magical special effects. The result is simply stunning considering that the film is 80 years old. It did not age at all, it is paced extremely well, and its backgrounds literally hypnotize the viewers of any age. By the power of her creativity and imagination, Reiniger takes the viewers to the dream world of mesmerizing and magic characters and their incredible adventures.

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Mesmerizing!

If you've never seen it, you probably can't imagine how a silent movie of animated silhouettes could be anything but dull.

If you have seen it, you know better. The visuals are all astounding, and they just keep coming. The story is fascinating, full of the unexpected, and the music is great. This is not just a stale piece of film history . . . it's a great movie!

Incidentally, the aspect ratio on this disc is correct at 4:3. If some museum showed it widescreen, as reported by another reviewer, then they had their equipment set up incorrectly.

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Done again, but never done better

Prince Achmed captures more, in simple black-and-white cutouts, than others ever did with a whole palette. Just twenty minutes into this hour-plus movie, I had seen more events and action, in a kind of way, than most modern movies pack into their hour or more.

Historians note: a woman founded the world of animated feature films. As such, Dunarzhade, the leading female figure, was not only a strong character, but also very womanly. Back then, that meant a figure with deep hips and powerful lower body, a timeless kind of beauty that somehow seems to have gone out of fashion. These characters, halfway between stop animation and drawn characters, express everything clearly and more than clearly because Reinger still had to operate within the 'silent film' idiom of large gestures and few words. It works though, and I mean it works today, even when we've seen the ray-traced, radiosity-modeled, real-physics animation in the last half-hundred commercials.

Rich characters stand to the front, and evil villains, and wondrous monsters and heroes (sometimes the same), and dire disasters. Perhaps most of that comes from the viewer's demand that it be real. Even when we see the frozen fingers, we still read meaning into their actions. It's just fine that the observer defines the observation, Heisenberg aside. This incredible movie engages the imagination, it draws on the older myths, and it brings current personalitiies to life. As much as I hate to, I have to confess: some people won't like this. I can only pity their coarse and shallow tastes. Maybe a little magic wore off in this movie's 80-ish years, but only a little. Very little.

This not only defines where animation came from. It also defines where it is today, or should be.

-- wiredweird

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4

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