In the film the balloon is a symbol of hope and happiness in a very grey and dreary city, the colour standing out against the murky buildings.
The old slums, now replaced with standard housing blocks Apparently only five per cent of what you see in the film is left today, as the film’s release prompted the demolition of the slums, which were replaced with housing projects in the 1960’s. Le Ballon Rouge was filmed in the Belleville area of Paris, which at the time was made up of slums. The film ends with all the balloons of Paris float to the sad boy and fly him away into the sky. A group of bullies, jealous of the boy and his friendly balloon, chase them through the streets and destroy it.
The balloon follows him around, bobbling along behind him, on the bus to school, even getting him into trouble with his head teacher. He unties it, and finds out that it has a mind of its own. By the time the balloon has taunted a school teacher, flirted with a little girl’s blue balloon and admired itself in the mirror, it’ll be right up there with Chewbacca as your favourite movie sidekick.Le Ballon Rouge is a short, beautifully made film shot in colour, which tells the story of a little boy who finds a bright red balloon tied to a lamppost. Yet Lamorisse’s biggest trick is to make you feel for a kid’s plaything. And plot-wise - save a poignant, transcendental ending - that is pretty much it.īut, working three years before the arrival of the Nouvelle Vague, Lamorisse is infectiously playful, blending an on-the-streets realism with flashes of poetry and magic - how he makes the balloon move around corners and through windows without a pixel in sight is cinematic sleight of hand. Yet the balloon proves loyal and follows the nipper around the streets of Paris, from school to the shops to vacant play areas. A little boy (Pascal Lamorisse, the director’s son) finds a red one tangled around a street lamp and befriends it, but is forced to let it go by his grandmother. Some 54 years before Up, Lamorisse wrings cinematic gold out of the magical properties of balloons in a simple, affecting narrative.
While this may have ensured his place in the Board Game Hall Of Fame alongside Colonel Mustard, it pales into insignificance alongside Lamorisse’s 1956 achievement, The Red Balloon, still the only short film to win a Best Screenplay Oscar. At the age of 35, top French bloke Albert Lamorisse invented the strategic board game Risk.
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