The world’s earliest surviving animated feature is another feather in the cap of the great German film industry of the 1920s. Unique among art forms, film history oftens marks its milestones in terms of inventions and technological advances, such as sound, new color processes, more versatile cameras and lenses, and the refinement of methods for achieving special effects. The first movie to show off some new shit automatically earns a place in history—and the beautiful Adventures of Prince Achmed is one of those films. It’s the result of director Lotte Reiniger’s work in what’s become known as “silhouette animation”, in which all of the characters and foreground details of the action are merely black paperboard cut-outs painstakingly animated over a vibrant backdrop. Sounds primitive, but Reiniger certainly wasn’t. She’d worked with the likes of Paul Wegener and Fritz Lang, hobnobbed among the avant garde bohemians of the Weimar era and was entrenched in Expressionism. Her ambitions were big. The cut-out figures here are carefully detailed, often covered in elaborate spangles and unique character lines to distinguish each one for the silent screen. For her subject matter, she used a mishmash of tales from Arabian Nights, a perfect inspiration for outlandish drama and exotic design. Reiniger started making it in 1923 and finished it in 1926. Almost a solid hundred years later, restored to its original color tinting and with a new orchestral recording of Wolfgang Zeller’s booming vintage score attached, Reiniger’s work has no reason to apologize. I’d even say that today’s computer animation only makes this early stuff look all the more weird and dreamy.