The Seven Ravens is a German stop motion

Stop motion

Stop motion is an animation technique to make a physically manipulated object appear to move on its own. The object is moved in small increments between individually photographed frames, creating the illusion of movement when the series of frames is played as a continuous sequence...

-animated fairytale film directed by the Diehl brothers. It was released in Germany on 2 December 1937. It was also the third feature film to use puppet animation, behind The New Gulliver

The New Gulliver

The New Gulliver is a Soviet stop motion-animated cartoon, and the first to make such extensive use of puppet animation, running almost all the way through the film . The film was released in 1935 to widespread acclaim and earned Ptushko a special prize at the International Cinema Festival in Milan...

from 1935 and The Tale of the Fox

The Tale of the Fox

The Tale of the Fox was stop-motion animation pioneer Ladislas Starevich's first fully animated feature film. It is based on the tales of Renard the Fox. Although the animation was finished in Paris after an 18-month period , there were major problems with adding a soundtrack to the film...

, released in Germany seven months earlier.

Plot

The plot is based on the fairy tale

The Seven Ravens

The Seven Ravens is a German fairy tale collected by the Brothers Grimm.It is tale number 25, and Aarne-Thompson type 451, the brothers who were turned into birds. Georgios A Megas collected another, Greek variant in Folktales of Greece...

 of the same name which was written by the Brothers Grimm

Brothers Grimm

The Brothers Grimm , Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm , were German academics, linguists, cultural researchers, and authors who collected folklore and published several collections of it as Grimm's Fairy Tales, which became very popular...

.