[3]) The Adventures of Prince Achmed features a silhouette animation technique Reiniger had invented that involved manipulated cutouts made from cardboard and thin sheets of lead under a camera.
Reiniger also used the first form of a multiplane camera in making the film,[5] one of the most important devices in pre digital animation.
[6] Several famous avant-garde animators worked on this film with Lotte Reiniger, among them Walter Ruttmann, Berthold Bartosch, and Carl Koch.
While Achmed fights a giant snake, the sorcerer takes Pari Banu to China and sells her to the Emperor.
Aladdin tells of how he, a poor tailor, was recruited by the sorcerer to retrieve a magic lamp from a cave.
[8] The reason why an adaptation of Arabian Nights was chosen was based on the idea that the action should show events that would only be possible with animation.
A Berlin banker named Louis Hagen financed the movie, and offered the team to use the attic of the garage in his vegetable garden as their studio.
Stars were made by holding a cardboard with small holes in front of a strong light, superimposed pieces of semitransparent tissue paper was used to make waves, and silver paper for moonlit water.
For other movable backgrounds, which sometimes included the use of two negatives, they made different layers covered with substances like sand, paint and soap.
Soap, it is quite extraordinary, with soap one can do everything.”[9][10] Reiniger was one of the first filmmakers in the 20th century to attempt a portrayal of the queer experience with a pair of openly gay lovers in this film: the Emperor of China and a male character named Ping Pong.
"I knew lots of homosexual men and women from the film and theater world in Berlin, and saw how they suffered from stigmatization.
[...] I suspect that when the Emperor kisses Ping Pong, that must have been the first happy kiss between two men in the cinema and I wanted it to happen quite calmly in the middle of Prince A[c]hmed so children — some who would be homosexual and some who would not — could see it as a natural occurrence, and not be shocked [n]or ashamed.
"[11] While the original film featured color tinting, prints available just before the restoration had all been in black and white.
Working from surviving nitrate prints, German and British archivists restored[12] the film during 1998 and 1999, including reinstating the original tinted image by using the Desmet method.
English-market DVDs were released, distributed by Milestone Films and available in NTSC R1 (from Image) and PAL R2 (from the BFI).
Reiniger created photograms for the orchestras, which were common in better theatres of the time, to follow along the action.
The site's critics consensus reads, "The Adventures of Prince Achmed's exquisitely crafted visuals are more than matched by its utterly enchanting story.