Predating Snow White, this Arabian Nights adaptation by German filmmaker Lotte Reineger is both the earliest surviving animated feature film, and one of the most beautiful ever made. Her intricately hand-crafted shadow puppets and props create stunning visual effects on an animation stand that prefigured Disney’s famous multi-plane camera.

This film is screening in the current Adelaide Cinémathèque program and guest curated by Idris Kellerman.

Animation Transformed – Guest Programmed by Idris Kellerman from moviejuice

Where last year’s Animation in Transformation programme explored visual metamorphosis, this programme showcases how filmmakers have negotiated flatness in animation aesthetics as cinema is transformed by technological change, and how animation aesthetics have been transferred into live-action cinema. The four films in this programme all use flattened images and compositing to create fantastical worlds which foreground their artifice in different ways, with surprising aesthetic connections emerging across them.