Director/Producer/Screenplay: Lotte Reiniger
Producer/Photography: Carl Koch
Production co: Comenius-Film GmbH

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REVIEWS

“The oldest extant animated feature film, Lotte Reiniger’s exquisite silhouette animation took her small team three years and more than 250,000 frames to create.  It was first exhibited in 1926, thus stealing a significant march on Disney’s 1937 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.  Scooping the flying and fantastical elements from a handful of Arabian Night stories, chosen to show off the transformative possibilities of Reiniger’s delicate hand-snipped animations and settings, this is a wonderfully inventive piece.  It’s far from a saccharine fairytale, its images jaw-droppingly pliable and protean for early animation.

Watching the African Sorcerer stretch himself into a kangaroo or duel with the Fire Witch as a sinuous, snapping succession of animals (a sequence so effective that it was recreated in Disney’s The Sword in the Stone many year’s later), you can see an inventive fierceness about the film’s set pieces.  Filigreed and elaborate, the figure outlines nimbly articulate their characters… Manipulated with balletic grace they swoop giddily through avant-gardist Walter Ruttman’s tinted multi-plane landscapes, which give the film a more abstract feel than Reiniger adaptations.”

— Kate Stables, Sight & Sound.

​Restoration by the British Film Institute

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FILM SOCIETY SCREENINGS*

Nelson 
Thursday, 29 March, 6:00pm

Wellington
Monday, 9 April, 6:15pm

Auckland 
Monday, 16 April, 6:30pm

Palmerston North 
Monday, 23 April, 6:00pm

Whanganui 
Monday, 30 April, 6:30pm
Followed by Fantastic Planet at 8pm

Hamilton 
Monday, 14 May, 8:00pm

Canterbury 
Monday, 28 May, 7:30pm

​*Non-members welcome by donation (notes only please)​

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More in the ANIMATION SHOWCASE >>

See more ​GERMAN CINEMA >>

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THE ADVENTURES OF PRINCE ACHMED​ (Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed) is presented in co-operation with the Goethe Institut

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