The oldest surviving feature-length animated film, directed by Lotte Reiniger. Another film adapted from the Arabian Nights (I just watched Thief of Bagdad earlier in the week), this is notable primarily for its use of silhouetted stop-motion animation, using handcrafted cutouts with a beautiful, astounding level of detail.

It's wonderful the Germans made such a great movie. Here is the evidence that a great animation doesn't need special effects to make a fabulous story.

The original title of the film is Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed

Although a couple of long-lost Argentinean films may or may not predate it, this stands in the history books as the oldest surviving feature-length animated picture in history, a fact which is genuinely astounding given how well it's aged. Although the entire film is populated by silhouettes, the creative intellects responsible quickly shift that handicap into a calling card. Extravagantly ornate character and set designs give us more than enough to establish the cast and tell its ambitious fairy tale, while the thick black mattes leave just as much of the screen to be filled in by the viewer's imagination. Judged by modern standards the pace is very slow, but the plot - lifted piecemeal from a dozen different myths and fables - moves in unexpectedly bold directions. Best viewed as a spectacular time capsule, it's an enlightening glimpse at the roots of a proud industry that's yet to finish its first century.