Original title: Le ballon rouge

!!SPOILER WARNING: THIS REVIEW GIVES AWAY THE FILM’S ENDING!!

In just 34 beautifully shot and almost entirely wordless minutes (the are only a handful of lines of dialogue), writer/director Albert Lamorisse manages to cram in more insightful observations of childhood fears, joys and fantasies than most directors can manage in a whole career. The Red Balloon has affected viewers young and old since it was first released and, despite the paucity of dialogue, it took home year’s Best Original Screenplay (the only short film to ever win the award), to go with its Palme d’Or for short films and BAFTA Special Award.

Like all good films about and primarily aimed at children, the secret of The Red Balloon‘s success is its very simplicity. In an off-the-tourist-track quarter of Paris (it was primarily shot in the Ménilmontant neighbourhood of Belleville – the Eiffel Tower is only briefly glimpsed in the distance, barely visible through the murk of a rainy day), a young boy (a winning performance from Pascal Lamorisse, the director’s son) finds the eponymous red balloon tied to a lamppost. Untying it, he finds that it has a mind of its own and starts to follow him everywhere, staying close to him like a faithful pet. Their friendship is tested by adults, some of who are helpful (pedestrians offer umbrellas to keep the balloon dry during a downpour) some less so (the boy’s mother makes him send it outside, a sinister headmaster tries to keep it out of the school, a bus conductor stops it from boarding and a beadle escorts it out of the local church. On their journey, the red balloon flirts with a blue balloon carried by a young girl (Sabine Lamorisse, the director’s daughter) but they also attract the attention of a gang of bullies. The boy and his balloon initially manage to evade the bullies but in the strangely heart-breaking finale, the boys puncture it with a catapult leaving the boy distraught at the “death” of his friend. His grief is short-lived however as the balloons of Paris free themselves from their owners, converge on the boy and carry him into the sky and off to who knows where.

Lemorisse, mainly known as a documentarist (The Red Balloon looks like much of it was shot guerrilla-style on the streets of Paris), gets all the credit for the film’s enduring successand that’s fair enough, but we can’t ignore the contributions made by Maurice Le Roux’s beautiful, sometimes mournful, sometimes playful score and above all the gorgeous photography of Edmond Séchan. The film is full of gorgeous shots of a part of Paris not usually seen on screen and indeed an area that was about to be swept away by the tides of progress. As the 60s wore on, the neighbourhood became more dilapidated and run-down until much of it was bulldozed in a slum-clearance project. The setting is deliberately muted, not only the better to show off the balloon, but also to suggest the drabness of a young child’s life in a country still rebuilding from a war fought and won before he was born.

As such, it’s tempting to see the balloons as brightly coloured balloons as beacons of hope for the younger generation (at one point in the final moments, red, white and blue balloons drift by suggesting the French national flag). Others have seen religious connotations in the film, suggest that, like Christ, the balloon is “killed” on a hilltop and the boy is then lifted into the heavens by a host of helium-filled guardian angels. But more likely, the film was simply meant to be a conduit to our childhood experiences, and as such it remains unparalleled. It may be set in late 1950s Paris but it has a universal and timeless appeal that has enabled it to entrance generations of new viewers.

The balloon effects are very impressive – you won’t see the wires even in blu-ray versions and you never once question that it’s a living and sentient thing, not just a ball of gas-inflated latex. Lamorisse invests the red balloon with a surprising amount of personality – it’s resourceful, playful, often teasing the boy, but also dutifully following him everywhere and riding out the attempts by some adults to separate them. The boy seems a lonely character, having no other friend but the balloon who brings, if only briefly, some real joy into his humdrum life. At the end, the fate of a simple balloon, it’s skin puckering hideously as it slowly inflates, might just be enough to bring a tear to your eye.

The final shots, of the boy floating serenely across the rooftops of Paris, may have inspired the Pixar film Up (2009) and red balloons have been regular fixtures in films ever since, some definitely inspired by Lamorisse’s film, like Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Flight of the Red Balloon (2007), some perhaps more obliquely – It (2017), The Sixth Sense (1999) and perhaps even Bob Godfrey and Zlatko Grgic’s more adult-oriented animated short Dream Doll (1979). Lamorisse has said that his subsequent feature film Le Voyage en ballon/Stowaway in the Sky (1960) which also stars Pascal as a boy fascinated with, this time, a hot-air balloon, is a spiritual successor to The Red Balloon.

A film with barely any dialogue about a lonely young boy and an intelligent balloon might seem like the hardest of sells, but The Red Balloon is so effortlessly charming, clever and ultimately moving that it doesn’t really need any hype. Its reputation, well deserved, precedes it and it remains one of the greatest children’s films ever made. It’s certainly one of the most positive and literally uplifting and in these increasingly uncertain times it deserves to be seen more than ever.