The Adventures of Prince Achmed

Lotte Reiniger, 1926: the first surviving animated feature, cut from paper, lit from behind, three years of a woman and a pair of scissors. Prince Achmed, a sorcerer, a flying horse, Aladdin, the Witch of the Fiery Mountain. Carl Koch and Walter Ruttmann on the effects. Germany, the Weimar atelier as a lamp. It is The Arabian Nights told as shadow, and it remains more inventive than most of what CGI did with the same stories. Reiniger died in 1981; the film is the one that outlived the argument about who invented the feature cartoon.