Here is yet another illustraSean of Dinuguanggal!
2026 marks the 100th anniversary of the oldest surviving feature-length animated film: The Adventures of Prince Achmed by Lotte Reiniger, Queen of Silhouette Puppets. I looked into the history of how the film was completed and submitted to the German censorship board by January 1926, and how distributors initially shunned the film, thinking that a feature-length animated film wouldn’t be profitable, and how in the subsequent months, it built a highly positive reputation with a press screening in Germany and public showings in France (where it wound up being screened for a total of nine months), and how the Germans finally gave it a normal release in September. Overall, I think any month of this year is good enough to celebrate the anniversary.
Here is my tribute piece. With only two colors, you might call this drawing… binary.
Reiniger and her crew pioneered the multi-plane camera for Achmed. This was before Disney made more advanced rigs with movable planes in the 1930s. Nowadays, software lets us add and edit layers so easily. Dinuguanggal is, in concept, a mix between ancient and high tech, so I see her as the best of my characters to give a shout-out to this wonderful old and sophisticated film.
Production Bits
- I labeled my layer groups in the Krita document Plane 0, Plane 1, and Plane 2 to allude to both multi-plane photography and 0-based indexing.
- Some of the erasing was done with Bezier curve selections, as if I were cutting into cardboard like Reiniger did.
Instances From The Film I've Referenced
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While the film conveys facial features largely through silhouettes, a few of its characters still have visible sclera. The Sorcerer also has a front-facing pose with cutouts for his mouth and nose. I did something similar to make Dinu’s mask still look right.
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Several of the dresses, headgear, and curtains are meshes with many interior slices. As I was watching the film, I thought of how I could use that technique to portray Dinu’s blood patterns and gecko pads. The result has… far more on-body slices than the characters in the film do. Maybe I should have toned it down for authenticity. I took the pattern to the extreme that the inks aren’t all one contiguous piece (not even close), but maybe this would still be somewhat plausible as a physical puppet with a transparent film to connect the major pieces, and with the dripping blood gravy on a separate sheet/plane.
Playlist For The Piece
- Rain on the Graves [Bruce Dickinson]
- Bloodclock [Fleshgod Apocalypse]
- Less Than *& [Nine Inch Nails]
- Reptile * [Nine Inch Nails]
- As Alive As You Need Me To Be* [Nine Inch Nails]
- The Warning [Nine Inch Nails]
- ERROR - Live from Auditorio Nacional [The Warning]
- Twisted Transistor [ Korn]
- Machine [Retromorphosis]
- 81 Special * [Caravan Palace]
- Fear of the Dark * [Iron Maiden]
* → I got to see them play it live!
& → I picked this initially for the synth sounds, but then I learned that the music video features Polybius, a real game inspired by a mythical game that allegedly was used on players to manipulate their brain activity and collect their user data… not unlike Dinu as a character.
Font Credits
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Movie Poster Font: SF Movie Poster, painted over for subtle blood texture.
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String Declaration Text: Self-painted but referenced coding fonts such as Monoid and IBM Plex Mono, so I could get it looking organic and drippy but also fairly evenly spaced.