Week 3: The Adventures of Prince Achmed

     This week I looked through Little Nemo also Krazy and Ignantz but I couldn’t find specifically the stories you wanted us to read. So I looked up The Adventures of Prince Achmed, and surprisingly found many bits and pieces of it.

      I was drawn to it right away. The quality is so raw and quick cut and simplistic, using positive and negative shapes. The whole movie was entirely a graphic positive shape of black depicting the characters and environments on a negative background of a solid color (sometimes including soft shifts in that color to signify mountains and such). You think this could work perfectly and can be made very simplistic, but not in this case. Lotte Reiniger creates really complex backgrounds, trees with every branch. Animals with complex and detailed fur, and somehow he makes it work and it is never too much. His characters that hold importance have interesting traits and even though are all just black shapes they can be told apart, via specific clothing or shapes/features exaggeration.  Specifically there is a part where Achmed is amongst trees and bushes when suddenly bird people appear in the sky. He hides and the bird people come down and shed their costumes. Okay so this whole scene is filled with intricate feathers and trees in a small, enclosed space. Then these people take off their costumes all while someone is hiding within a bush or intricate leaves.  It sounds like a disaster of detail, but somehow the fact of the positive and negative shapes work really well here. With Achmed hiding in the bush a strong negative shape around both the bush and Achmed really helps him pop and is 100% readable.

      For the context and overall execution this film really works as a final piece. While searching for this I found more of his other works and I would defiantly enjoy watching some of them as well.