June 9, 2026
The princess, the shadows, the snub
The oldest surviving animated feature film at 100
Before Disney, there was Lotte — and commenters are stunned they never knew
TLDR: Lotte Reiniger’s *The Adventures of Prince Achmed* turns 100 as the oldest surviving animated feature, beating Disney to the punch by years. In the comments, people are stunned they’d never heard of her, swapping links, praise, and art-history theories like they’ve just uncovered a lost legend.
A 100-year-old movie just kicked off the internet’s favorite kind of culture shock: “Wait… why did nobody tell me this existed?” Lotte Reiniger’s The Adventures of Prince Achmed, released in 1926, is the oldest surviving animated feature film — yes, older than Disney’s Snow White by more than a decade. And the comment section is having a mini identity crisis over it. One person flat-out admitted, “I’m shocked I never heard of this before,” while others rushed in with YouTube links, documentaries, and full uploads like film nerds responding to a historical emergency.
What has people so fired up is the sheer how-on-earth-did-she-do-that factor. Reiniger started in silent film handling rats on The Pied Piper of Hamelin, then turned that strange job into a lightbulb moment and invented a dazzling style using hand-cut shadow figures moved frame by frame. Commenters are calling it “unlike anything I’ve seen before” and “amazing,” with the mood swinging between awe, gratitude, and mild outrage that film history classes apparently skipped this icon.
There’s even a dash of classy comment-thread detective work: one user wondered whether Reiniger knew of French shadow-theatre artist Henri Rivière, nudging the conversation from pure praise into art-history sleuthing. So while the article celebrates a forgotten pioneer, the real show is the crowd reaction: part discovery party, part Disney myth-busting, part communal gasp that one of animation’s biggest legends was hiding in plain sight on YouTube.
Key Points
- •*The Adventures of Prince Achmed* was released in 1926 and is identified in the article as the oldest surviving animated feature film.
- •Lotte Reiniger began in film work during the silent era and was introduced to animation while working on *The Pied Piper of Hamelin*, where wooden rats were animated frame by frame.
- •Reiniger developed a silhouette-based stop-motion method using articulated figures on a glass plate lit from below and photographed from above.
- •By 1919, Reiniger had completed her first short film, *The Ornament of the Loving Heart*, and later made additional shorts and a Nivea advertisement before securing feature funding in 1923.
- •For *The Adventures of Prince Achmed*, Reiniger directed, built the puppets, devised the scenario from several Middle Eastern fairy tales, and worked with a small production team including her husband on camera.