Lotte Reiniger's silhouette epic beat Disney to feature animation by a decade

A century after its 1926 premiere, Lotte Reiniger’s The Adventures of Prince Achmed stands as the oldest surviving animated feature film — predating Disney’s Snow White, long marketed as the first, by more than ten years. Reiniger, a Berlin-born artist who got her start wrangling rats on a silent-era Pied Piper production, turned a childhood talent for cutting silhouette puppets into a new filmmaking method: articulated cardboard-and-lead figures animated frame by frame on backlit glass, at over a thousand frames per minute of footage. Backed by a Berlin banker and working with a tiny crew that included her husband on camera, she spent three years directing, designing, and hand-cutting the film herself. She was 26 when it premiered.

The film’s most consequential innovation was an early multiplane camera — a scaffold rig shooting down through stacked glass layers moved at different speeds to create depth, used for sequences like Prince Achmed’s flight against a three-layer starry sky. Walt Disney later received a 1940 US patent for the multiplane camera and, in 2000, induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for it, while Reiniger’s earlier use went largely uncredited. Disney’s marketing also cemented the myth that Snow White was the first feature-length animated film, a claim still echoed on the studio’s home-video packaging.

Historians hedge on calling Prince Achmed the absolute first: Argentine filmmaker Quirino Cristiani made a cut-out feature, El Apóstol, in 1917, but every copy is lost and its runtime undocumented, so the BFI’s animation curator prefers ‘earliest surviving’ over ‘oldest.’ Though praised by critics — Jean Renoir compared Reiniger to Mozart — the film was distributed as experimental art rather than entertainment, limiting its reach. Its restoration and continued screenings a hundred years on underscore Reiniger’s place as a foundational, and long undersung, figure in cinema history.