The wonderful craft pages at the equally wonderful blog Bloesem Kids features instructions how to create your own shadow puppet show. By chance, the post came up on the same day that I received a DVD of the 1926 film The Adventures of Prince Achmed, a movie by the German animator Lotte Reiniger, whose style was greatly determined by traditional Chinese shadow puppets.

The Adventures of Prince Achmed is taken from The Arabian Nights, and tells the story of the Caliph’s son, who is borne away to adventure by a flying mechanical horse, created by an evil magician. The silhouettes are at once intricate and expressive, beautifully setting forth the framework of the story, while enticing the viewer’s imagination to fill in its details.

Several clips from the movie are viewable on YouTube: I encourage you to be inspired by them, and by Arounna Khounnoraj’s Bloesem project, and see what you and your kids can create yourselves!

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 17th, 2008 at 10:33 am and is filed under Miscellany. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.