Week #2 -film

The Adventures of Prince Achmed by Lotte Reininger

- comparison with a wordless comic, the Arrival -

     Lotte Reininger’s the Adventure of Prince Achmed is a film with no spoken dialogue. I found that there are similarities between this film and a wordless comic, the Arrival by Shaun Tan. 
     While the Arrival is completely wordless, there are written plots between the scenes in the Adventures of Prince Achmed. However, those written plots are just minimum, which is necessary to tell the characters’ name, locations, time, and so on. The reason for this difference between two works might be the amount of detail; in the Arrival, the artist is able to show the details of locations and characters by its art and thus it does not require any words. On the other hand, the Adventures of Prince Achmed only uses silhouette to tell the story and thus the amount of details is more restricted. However, similar to the Arrival, the Adventures of Prince Achmed does not use any words describing the action/motion of the characters; without any words, it still delivers the clear actions because the animation uses clear and expressive poses/silhouette for each characters. 
     Although I mentioned that the amount of detail in the Adventures of Prince Achmed is restricted, it uses such a fine patterns for its clothing, background, and so on. Using shadow and only one color for each scenes, it still creates a beautiful and unique world of the film. Like as I did for the Arrival, I was especially fascinated by the Adventures of Prince Achmed’s layout for the every scenes; each scene has dynamic and contrasted composition and thus the charm of this monochromatic style is maximized. 

     Both the Arrival and the Adventures of Prince Achmed do not rely on the dialogue and word to explain but visually tell the story. As a student learning animation, I learned a lot from these expressive and dynamic works.

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