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You’d be hard-pressed to find a more poetic movie than The Red Balloon, Albert Lamorisse’s 34-minute daydream. Dialogue is so sparse it may as well be a silent. Everything essential about the story is conveyed in image, setting, rhythm, and color; it’s cinema crafted in its purest language. As with all good “poetic cinema,” it heightens ordinary life until it echoes with symbolic and evocative power. People have mapped all kinds of meanings onto the film: postwar anxiety, Christ allegory, the artist versus the assembly line, even queer self-recognition in recent years. Fair. But before it’s a big metaphor, so inflated with meaning it’s about to pop, The Red Balloon is an eternal delight about a kid and his willful, playful friend.
The kid is Pascal (Pascal Lamorisse, the director’s son), a quiet and lonely schoolboy who roams the Ménilmontant neighborhood of Paris. Pascal discovers a red balloon tied to a lamppost. The balloon quickly demonstrates a life of its own. It follows Pascal, plays keep-away, waits outside when adults say “no,” and generally acts like a mischievous pet that can levitate. That’s the plot, give or take: Boy protects fragile wonder while the world — teachers, parents, other kids, Paris itself — proves indifferent or hostile, depending on the setting. For whatever else you may hear the film saying, it’s a street-life fairy tale, first and foremost. My six- and eight-year-olds giggled, gasped, then went silent. Their dad, the jaded 37-year-old, did the same.
Lamorisse stages it as a fable tinged with docudrama, or maybe vice versa: He shoots bustling, soot-gray Paris on location as it is jolted awake by a shocking circle of red. The visual contrast the balloon generates is almost overpowering. Everyday textures — wet stone, tramlines, peeling poster glue — become a kind of negative space for red. Whether it’s floating dead center in close-up or a speck a quarter mile away, it dominates the frame. It navigates the crowded streets in a controlled flow, as if it controls the camera, too: the eye is always guided by that primary color spot. The compositions offer an almost musical structure for the circle to float through, too, with geometric patterns (windows, doorways, stairwells) turning the city into a staff on which the balloon bobs from note to note.
The movie’s true movie magic comes in the “performance” of that balloon. However Lamorisse did it — I assume some combination of wires, shrewd blocking, and editing sleights — the balloon always moves with a grace of motion suggesting curiosity and feeling. It nudges, taunts, sulks, smiles. Of course, it’s just a balloon, so it does none of those. But its anthropomorphism is so persuasive that the film recalls pantomime: you project emotions onto latex and air and then see it all mirrored back at you. It is Charlie Chaplin’s tramp. It is the skull Hamlet soliloquys to. It is a red circle.
The best thing Lamorisse does is refuse to sand down the world’s roughness. The Red Balloon’s Paris has a touch of The Third Man’s haunted postwar anarchy, but captured in storybook softness. The city has crumbling infrastructure and bomb-charred masonry. Alleys run narrow and damp. We detect that order is provisional, authority brittle. Against that, one buoyant dot of red becomes a small revolution, its buoyancy destabilizing and frightening. The other children who recognize difference try to stamp it out. Their cruelty isn’t operatic; it’s casual and almost presumed, which is part of what makes the blows against the balloon hurt so much. And yet, after the balloon’s desecration, the film offers a strange coda of benediction and solidarity from its latex peers.
The Red Balloon was an immediate sensation upon its release. It won the Short Film Palme d’Or at Cannes and then, in a historical curiosity, won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. It’s the only short ever to do so, which is especially bizarre given the has so little dialogue. The film’s popularity and repute have endured, too. Its fingerprints are all over modern animation especially: Pixar’s entire filmography practically springs from these 34 minutes, CGI ultimately replacing Lamorisse’s delicate prop work in the art of bringing inanimate objects to poetic life.
As with any film so simple and fabulistic, The Red Balloon offers as many readings and interpretations as it has viewers. For me, it’s a story about the terror and payoff of carrying your bright, impractical soul through a gray world. This is childhood, of course, and the weathering the balloon takes is a coming of age. But it’s also the condition of any person trying to make something beautiful where beauty is an inconvenience. The Red Balloon is optimistic without lying about the cost. In 2025, that kind of truth is more valuable than ever. Thus The Red Balloon is as timely as it is timeless.
Is It Good?
Exceptionally Good (7/8)
Dan is the founder and head critic of The Goods. Follow Dan on Letterboxd. Join the Discord for updates and discussion.