The Red Balloon (1956)

The best "children's films" should be accessible to both children and adults, and certainly in recent cinema the Pixar films have been a great example of this cross-generational appeal. Children love them because they can relate to the characters in the film and they tell a good story, but the best children's films are equally adored by adults because it takes them back to a more innocent time, and they can often relate on a different level to the story. When I was a kid I loved Don Bluth's animation An American Tail (1986) because it told a great adventure story, and also looked amazing. I didn't watch it again for years, but now I can appreciate that it's basically telling a story about Russian-Jewish immigrants starting a new life in the USA, only to discover that it's not quite the land of opportunity that they were expecting. Obviously when I was seven years old, this went right over my head: I was far too busy singing the catchy songs to concern myself with the sociological issues raised by the films' subtext.
So when, at the 1956 Cannes Film Festival, The Red Balloon (Le Ballon rouge) won the short film Palme d'Or at Cannes, and then at the 1957 Academy Awards won the films' writer/director/producer Albert Lamorisse an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, it had to be far more than just a "children's film".

Set in the Belleville neighbourhood of Paris, the 34-minute film tells the story of Pascal, a young boy who finds a large helium-filled red balloon on his way to school one morning, tied to a lamppost. We see him sweetly looking after the balloon as he walks around the Parisian streets, taking care to cover it under pedestrians' umbrellas when it rains. He then begins to realise that the balloon has a mind of its own, and it has become attached to Pascal, even floating outside his bedroom window, as his mother forbids him from bringing it into their apartment. He wanders around the streets of Belleville, but his unusual companion soon draws envious eyes from the other boys on the neighbourhood who try to steal the balloon from him, and who are stunned to see that whenever Pascal releases it, the balloon floats up into the air, but always returns back to Pascal. They eventually trap Pascal and his balloon, destroying it, but all of the other balloons in the area then are drawn towards the boy, and as they cluster together, they lift him off the ground, to float high over the rooftops of Paris.

The French filmmaker Albert Lamorisse had received some attention when his 1953 short film White Mane won the short film Palme d'Or, a success The Red Balloon would repeat. Though he would continue making films until his untimely death in a helicopter crash in Iran in 1970, it is for The Red Balloon that he is best known (oddly, he also invented the board game Risk in 1957). The boy who plays Pascal is his son, called Pascal in real life, and his daughter Sabine also appears in the film holding a blue balloon. Pascal had also appeared in White Mane, but after this film would never be heard of again.

This also provides an interesting document of the Belleville area - most of the buildings that are seen in The Red Balloon were later torn down by the French government in an (ultimately futile) effort to remove the slum-like areas that had appeared in the area following the influx of immigrants after World War II. Indeed all of the buildings in the opening shot (see above) have been long destroyed, as have the stairs below which lead to the spot where Pascal first discovers the balloon.

What's most striking about The Red Balloon is that there is virtually no dialogue in the entire film, lending it an almost fable-like spirit. It's testament to the strength of the story and writing that despite this, the film still won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. Similarly, it's only on looking back that you notice that very little is revealed about Pascal himself. We see him on the daily walk to school, but we never see any of his friends, and the only possible family we meet are an old lady dressed in black who seems to look after him. Whether she's his grandmother, mother, or someone else entirely, is left for the audience to decide.

The Red Balloon is a film about the innocence of childhood, about believing that an item as unlikely as a balloon can have a mind of its own, but it's also a lesson that nothing lasts forever and that as much as good things happen, there's always enough bad people around to ruin the good stuff. Precisely because of the lack of dialogue it's got a universal appeal, and there's enough ambiguity to let the audience make their own mind up without falling into abstractism. I haven't got any children, but if I did I'd make them watch this film. Then I'd give them their own red balloon.