The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) review

One of the oldest animated films ever made has the title prince leaping onto a magical horse and flying away to a strange island called Wak Wak where he meets some lovely maidens, falls in love with Pari Banu, gets trapped in a pit (and uses a snake as a rope to escape), loses his lady, helps out Aladdin (who tells him the story of his special lamp), fights demons and saves his girl from a sorcerer.  According to the opening credits, "neither the original negative nor a complete copy of the German original has survived" which explains why it's more than a little scattershot, but the technique employed by Reiniger, which involves silhouette animation combined with colored tinting, had to tediously be recorded frame-by-frame over the course of several years (although I confess I found it periodically hard to figure out who's who).  Considering how vibrant it is to look at today, it must have been mind-blowing in the mid-20's - apparently, none other than Jean Renoir helped get it shown in Paris.