The stolen flying horse takes off
Every figure on screen is a hand-cut, hinged cardboard-and-lead-foil silhouette, animated a fraction of a millimeter at a time and shot frame by frame in a friend's garage by a crew of five. To fake real depth, Reiniger stacked her silhouettes across horizontal panes of glass at different distances from the camera and moved them independently -- a multiplane setup she worked out roughly a decade before Walt Disney's studio patented and popularized its own version. The film took about five years to complete. Because the two earlier animated features by Quirino Cristiani in Argentina no longer survive, Prince Achmed stands as the oldest surviving animated feature film.