The earliest feature-length animated film to have survived. Only two Argentinean films by Quirino Cristiani, both presumed lost, predate it.
Lotte Reiniger cut figures out of black cardboard with scissors, and joined movable parts with thread in order to animate them. From 1923-26 about 250,000 frame-by-frame stills were made and 96,000 were used in the film. Her husband, Carl Koch, was responsible for the photography in all her films until his death in 1963.
Although some non-public screenings of the completed film occurred in Berlin, Germany as early as 2 May 1926, the first public screening was in Paris in July 1926, through the mediation of Jean Renoir.
No prints of the original German version are known to exist and, as such, the film was long available only in black and white. It was only thanks to a color copy with English intertitles from the National Film and Television Archive of the British Film Institute that the film was able to be reconstructed and restored in 1999 using the Desmet method.
In the film, the tale of the magical girl Peri Banu and her "cloak of feathers" seems to be largely based on folklore tales about the swan maidens. They are mythical women who use a garment with swan feathers to shape-shift. When men steal their garments while the women bathe, they prevent them from leaving and force them into marriage. Such folklore tales have appeared in nearly every European country, in India, and in China.