One of the movies that I got the chance to DVR during the Women Make Film series on TCM is The Adventures of Prince Achmed. It does seem to have gotten a DVD and Blu-ray release that, the last time I checked, still seems to be in print, so I sat down to watch it and do a review on it here.
After a screen informing us that this German silent was known only to exist in a British archive and that this print was restored with German intertitles added back in, we get to the actual movie, which informs us that it is a "silhouette movie" from Lotte Reiniger. This means that it's a stop-motion animation film, of sorts, with paper cut-outs against tinted backdrops used to illustrate the action.
As for that action, it involves an evil sorcerer who creates a magic flying horse for a caliph in a medieval Arabian kingdom. The caliph's son, Prince Achmed, get to ride the horse, which is a bit hard to control, eventually taking him to the magical land of Wak-Wak, which is where he meets lovely Princess Pari Banu. Meanwhile, the sorcerer is using this as a diversion to try to get Achmed's sister, Princess Dinarzade, for himself.
Achmed and Pari Banu eventually leave Wak-Wak and wind up in distant China, where the sorcerer finds them and kidnaps Pari Banu, taking her to be sold to the Chinese Emperor. With the help of a which who is the enemy of the sorcerer, Achmed tries to find Pari Banu.
It turns out that to get Pari Banu back, Achmed is going to have to open the Gate of Wak-Wak, which can only be done if he is in possession of Aladdin's lamp. Aladdin here is a tailor who gets the lamp himself, and decides that he'd like to marry Dinarzade himself; being a subject of the Caliph, he may just get his wish granted unlike the sorcerer who is an outsider.
The stories in The Adventures of Prince Achmed are apparently taken from The 1001 Nights and as such are really nothing new. What is new, at least for 1926 when the movie was released, is the animation. It's one of the earliest surviving animated features (a short feature at about 65 minutes but a feature nonetheless), and must have been an extremely painstaking process to make.
The effort, however, is worth it. Thanks to the restoration, the cut-outs are lovely to look at. This is enhanced by the tinted backgrounds, and a filming process that gives a surprising effect of depth. The Adventures of Prince Achmed is a simple enough story that's sure to enchant young and old alike, although for the youngest viewers who might not yet be able to read, having to deal with intertitles would be a barrier. (The restored German intertitles have English subtitles on the print TCM showed. My German is generally good enough that I can read German intertitles, but I found that these title cards went by faster than in Hollywood features, making reading the intertitles a bit more difficult.)
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