Lotte Reiniger's The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) turns 100 in 2026. This international events series celebrates the German artist on the centenary of her ground-breaking silhouette film, now considered the earliest-surviving feature-length in animation history.
2026 marks the centenary of Lotte Reiniger's magnum opus, The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926), the earliest surviving feature length film in animation history. The film is an enchanting amalgamation of stories from the Arabian Nights animated in cut paper silhouettes and featuring special effects using sand, wax, and soap. Reiniger designed a multiplane animation table on which she and her team of avant-garde artists innovated and animated over 250,000 frames from 1923-1926. Created in an attic in Potsdam, Prince Achmed premiered in a private press screening at the Volksbühne Theater in Berlin on 2 May 1926. It continued on to Paris, where it premiered publicly to rave reviews at the Comédie des Champs- Elysées on 1 July 1926 and returned triumphantly to Berlin, where it enjoyed an extended run at the Gloria-Palast from 3 September 1926. Since then, The Adventures of Prince Achmed has endured as a dazzling - if often overlooked - monument in film history, an exquisite artifact of Weimar Cinema, and a genre defying experiment in melding international folk art traditions with the technical possibilities of a new medium.