DOHA: A beautiful piece of German animated film, older than Walt Disney's Snow White, will be shown at the Waqif Art Center in Souq Waqif on December 5 at 8pm.
The Souq Waqif film-showing of The Adventures of Prince Achmed, a 1926 feature-length animated film by the German animator Lotte Reiniger, is one of the events of the German Cultural Weeks, which will run until December 12.
The Adventures of Prince Achmed predates Snow White, lauded as the first full-length animated film, by a decade. Reiniger, a silhouette artist, produced the masterpiece in her employer's garage.
The feature-length silent animated film shows the silhouette animation technique Reiniger had invented which involved manipulated cutouts made from cardboard and thin sheets of lead under a camera. Research shows the technique he used for the camera is similar to Wayang shadow puppets.
"This is a very old movie, an historic German film... which will be a part of the German Cultural Weeks... This is the first time we are having a German Cultural Weeks in Qatar," Matthias Ohnemuller, a counsellor at the German Embassy, said in an earlier interview. Ohnemuller said German embassies in other Middle Eastern countries, however, already have this kind of cultural dialogue.
Ohnemuller said the German Embassy decided not to bring just one event for a day "but have a meeting... and meetings usually take time... and this is how we want to introduce our culture to the public."
During their preparations, which took them more than six months, Ohnemuller said they decided to bring not only music and art but also films. The films will be shown during the German film-showing at the Royal Plaza from November 22 to 26 and the film-showing at Souq Waqif.
The story of The Adventures of Prince Achmed is based on the elements taken from the collection 1001 Arabian Nights, specifically The Story of Prince Ahmed and the Fairy Paribanou featured in Andrew Lang's The Blue Fairy Book. With the assistance of Aladdin, the Witch of the Fiery Mountain, and a magic horse, the title character battles the evil African sorcerer to win the hand of Princess Peri Banu.
The story is a reflection of Reiniger's years of theatrical experience: archetypal characters displaying vivid emotions in a tale that takes advantage of the new medium of cinema to show fluid transformations and visual wonders.
The film features battles and romance and all the stuff an audience would expect from an animated epic. A new score for the film was done in 2008, composed by British composer Geoff Smith.
© The Peninsula 2009
