"I believe in the truth of fairy-tales more than I believe in the truth in the newspaper," said Lotte Reiniger, the German film artist who in 1926 created The Adventures of Prince Achmed, the first feature-length animation film. Her stated aim: to make a world unto itself. Using scissors and masses of black paper, she fabricated paper silhouettes of extraordinary delicacy and subtlety, each as graceful as a little black dress. Her use of silhouette capitalized on both the strength and fragility of paper, but more important, Reiniger made paper move. Despite many other productions over her long career, Prince Achmed remains her signature work. Walter Schobert, curator of the German Film Museum in Frankfurt, numbers it among the "greatest films of the 20th century."

The only daughter of a banker and a homemaker, Reiniger set great stock by her birth in the last year of the nineteenth century. Except for the fact that she worked in film, her techniques and sensibilities reflected the earlier century more than her own. She described her childhood as "extraordinarily" happy, her artistic interests celebrated and encouraged by both her parents. Theater captured her imagination early on, but after her first film, she was hooked; she had in the meantime discovered her "unsettling gift" for making silhouettes. Though inspired by shadow theater, Reiniger’s figures appear to have none of the stiffness of their non-film predecessors. "Film is movement," she noted, often comparing filmmaking to ballet. "It’s the combination of curves and diagonals that gives ballet and animation their sweet tenderness and their striking directness." While using literal light and shadow, Reiniger also relied on the shadings of music: the fine variations in her animations often parallel the tone and stress of musical notes rather than the hiccoughs of flip-book style animating techniques. She rather modestly noted that, "even with primitive materials, one can work small wonders."

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