The Red Balloon and Other Stories (1951-1965)

All unrated.
"The Red Balloon" -Kids are mean.  They destroy a balloon, which doesn't sound that bad, but the balloon has living traits to it.
"White Mane" -Horses are mean to each other.  There's biting and kicking and you know the horses really did that.
"Bim, the Little Donkey" -There's some animal cruelty with this one.  A kid almost chops the ears off a donkey.  
Stowaway in the Sky -Honestly, nothing.  There are fleeting moments where there's a chance that someone might die in a balloon, but those moments are quickly alleviated.
Circus Angel -Perhaps the most controversial of the group, the film centers around a thief who seems to take advantage of the people around him, occasionally for romantic gain.  While tonally a children's movie, the movie deals with suicide and morally dubious behavior. 

DIRECTOR: Albert Lamorisse

It's another collection of short films!  As per precedent, I'm only writing a little bit about each movie.  But it kind of makes me wonder.  What if I wrote a whole bunch about "The Red Balloon" itself?  I mean, there's stuff there to decompress.  I could probably find some really interesting stuff about this movie.  I'm sure that a master's thesis or two have been written about this movie.

"The Red Balloon" (1956)

Something awoke in me when I put the disc into the Playstation.  (Oh, that's right.  I watch Blu-rays on a PS4.  Like some kind of hobo-king.  I judge myself so you can't judge me.) I think that I used to watch this movie on repeat when I was a little kid.  Honestly, I think I may have formed my entire identity based on this film.  Golly, I related to this kid.  Maybe that makes me feel like I have victim status for the entirety of my life, but I just vibe with this movie so hard and it may have formed my entire moral schema.  

"The Red Balloon", for those not in the know, is the cottage core of short films until the last few minutes.  Lamorisse is clearly a guy who has a relationship with animals because the balloon is clearly a pet.  (Remember how I said that his movie defined me to a level that would be considered formative?  Yeah, I also am not a pet person.  My arguement falls apart quickly.) If pets are meant to make children understand mortality (you knew that, right?), "The Red Balloon" is meant to help children understand that pets die and that the world is a terrible place.  Honestly, one of the messages of this movie is "This is why we can't have nice things."  

This is one of those movies that covers a lot of ground absolutely simply.  There are nice adults and then there are mean adults.  Often, the mean adults are oblivious, not hating the child so much as afraid of change.  But most of the world is full of terrible people.  While Pascal was blessed with a balloon and shouldn't necessarily have ownership over it (THAT'S WHY THE BALLOON IS RED!) (Just kidding.) the other kids are so itching to do awful things to this balloon.  I mean, we get sad when bad things happen to pets.  But that last scene of the balloon slowly dying only to get stomped on my a kid, that's a lot.  Sure, we have the follow-up by all of the balloons chearing Pascal up, but the real hit comes in that moment.  Honestly, most of my moral stance comes from this.  Every time something nice and joyful happens, the majority of people decide to destroy it for fun.  (Just to date this blog even more, look at the Portal in Dublin.)  

​"White Mane" (1953)

This guy and pets, right?  Trust me, he does the same thing with "Bim, the Little Donkey".  Normally, I tend to watch a director's work in chronological order.  But when Criterion drops a box set, I watch it in the order they give me.  Maybe that's because I'm deferrent to people who I assume are smarter than me.  In this set, "The Red Balloon" came first.  I get it.  It's the hit.  I'm also going to say that it's the allegory that Lamorisse wanted to get across without the browbeating that some of the other movies really get to.  I know, when you anthropomorphize inanimate objects, it sells the message a bit better.  "White Mane" is not bad.  It's very pretty and almost pastoral.  

It's just that we get the message of cruelty.  I think that the villains of "White Mane" are both simultaneously more annoying and more villainous because they don't follow their own moral code.  They're jerks from the beginning, but a lot of it could be chalked up to what it means to be a rancher.  There's a wild horse; they fail to tame it.  Again, not a big animal guy, so I tend to be more forgiving of that stuff.  But when they tell the kid that he can keep the horse if he tames it then welch on that deal?  That seems beyond the pale.  I mean, breaking off that agreement gets the kid eventually killed.  It's pretty crummy.  But again, we hit a lot of the same beats as "Red Balloon".  The male child protagonist bonds with a rebellious animal and people want to take it from him, ultimately leading to its destruction.  "Bim, the Little Donkey", mostly the same thing.  Is this the only kind of movie that Lamorisse made?

​"Bim, the Little Donkey" (1951)


You know, I may have seen all of these before.  Maybe my dad was a Lamorisse fan or maybe our VHS had all of these short films on them.  Something in the back of my brain says that I know these stories beyond just a glance at them.  Again, "Bim, the Little Donkey" hits a lot of the same beats that both "The Red Balloon" and "White Mane" do.  If every one of these stories were stories that were made for children, "Bim" is the one that's most true of purpose.  What I mean by that is that it almost feels like the story was written by children.  Not necessarily Axe Cop style, but it is very children-at-play with its narrative.  There's a bad kid, but he turns good.  There are evil guards wielding scimitars. There's action and there are theives and people shaking fists at one another.  There's a chase and the kids are the ones saving the day.  

Also, the performances are childlike.  I can't help but be inspired by early silent films while watching this movie.  Like Lamorisse's other films, most of the film is silent. So much of the movie resorts to pantomime to really sell these moments.  True confession: Intellectually, I like silent movies.  Emotionally, like most people, I find them to be tedious. (I'm probably more gracious than most people, but I also don't begrudge people who hem and haw over silent film).  But there is something genuinely charming about a lot of the way silent film is shot.  While "Bim" is not a silent film, much of the technique mirrors it and it kind of steals the best parts of silent film.  As such, "Bim" plays this paradoxical thing with me.  It's partially a kind of dumber movie than the other two, but I also really enjoy it for what it is.

Stowaway in the Sky (1960)

Okay, Criterion. That's not fair.  I simply assumed this was a box set of short films.  You can't stick two feature length films as "...and Other Tales".  I don't know if I would have formatted this blog this way.  But you know what?  I'm going to milk all of this for content because it's my blog and who is going to stop me?  (I swear, if Square gets oddly specific about a rule I don't know about, I would be disappointed.)  No, I'm going to post this blog entry both as part of the "The Red Balloon and Other Tales" page and as its own blog.  I feel like I can do that.  I'll also do the same thing with Circus Angel, thus making me feel like I'm really crushing all of this material.

I wasn't ready for how much I loved this movie.  I have this one student, who may be reading this but is probably not, who is all about Hayao Miyazaki.  I love Miyazaki, but this student love-loves Miyazaki.  He's not necessarily one who would give something like Stowaway in the Sky a chance, but I saw him today and overtly recommended it.  Stowaway in the Sky is Miyazaki before Miyazaki.  Maybe that's what I need to take away from all of this Albert Lamorisse stuff.  I simply assumed that Stowaway in the Sky  was going to be marketing on the success of "The Red Balloon."  Maybe, at one point in the development, that could have been true.  After all, the opening titles say "The Voyage of the Red Balloon" in them.  But while "The Red Balloon" may have served as an inspiration or a starting point for this movie, that's really where it ends.

I have the feeling that Lamorisse is not a fan of actual conflict in his stories.  Sure, we could look at "Bim, the Little Donkey" or "White Mane" as stories that are all about conflict.  But the conflict in those stories are so simple and lack any complexity that it becomes more about the tone of the films in themselves.  Stowaway in the Sky even peels it back a little more.  Golly, it sounds like I'm ragging on the movie (despite the fact that this might be one of the best movies I've seen this year), but every time a conflict is introduced in the story, it's resolved in an almost hilariously short amount of time.  The boy doesn't get to go on the balloon?  He goes on the balloon?  They can't land the balloon?  Nope, they can land the balloon.  The girl is stuck in the balloon?  They get her down before the owner of the balloon even wakes up from his nap.  The balloon is supposed to blow up, not once but twice?  No one injured or in range of the explosion.  To top all of that off, they even have a spare balloon.  It's just...peaceful.

Miyazaki goes to certain wells for his material.  Lamorisse and Miyazaki probably share the same wells.  I was going to say that this is the first of his movies that I've seen where he doesn't share a deep love for animals.  But that's not even true.  The most gripping part of the story is when the two in the balloon come upon a stag being hunted.  It's that very European kind of hunting where there are hounds and horses and a bugle.  But Lamorisse comes down hard on the side of the animal.  There's something absolutely gorgeous about this sequence that harkens back to "Red Balloon" and "White Mane."  While the hunters in this film are almost devoid of any attempts at characterization, unlike the counterparts that I just cited, their role in the film is the same.  Intellectually, we can all instantly understand that there is a value to hunting.  But spiritually and emotionally, there's something fundamentally cruel about the entire concept of hunting, especially something that is so meant to instill fear in prey. Back to Miyazaki, it isn't too much of an emotional leap to go from taking care of animals to Miyazaki's affinity for environmentalism.  He hasn't shied away from telling stories abou taking care of creatures.  I know that both Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke have imagery where humans take care of injured animals.  

But the real connective tissue between these two directors is a love for flight.  Honestly, much of my love for this movie is wrapping my head around how these shots worked in this movie. I had to Google it just now.  I just needed to know.  (Short version?  It's actually a helicopter with the facade of a balloon basket for a lot of the shots.  But back to the love of flight that these two directors share.  Lamorisse bets everything on the notion that the beauty of the sky will sell the film in itself.  I have the vibe, based on the minimal Wikipedia page on this movie, that Stowaway might not have been the smash hit that a lot of people probably wanted it to be.  I also am terrified that I'm going to go on Letterboxd later and be the only one giving this movie five-stars.  Anyway, it's all about the visuals.  I've seen movies with grand visuals.  I write about them a lot.  But there's something about the visual language of Stowaway that actually makes the characterization work.  While "Bim, the Little Donkey" emphasized pantomime to convey emotions, Stowaway goes the other direction.  I love the kid and his grandfather, who just stare in awe at the world around them.  There's never moments of fear when the kid (even in real life!) is aware of how high they are. (Note: I do love that there's an attempt to build tension by saying if the balloon rises too high, it will explode.  But in one of the shots of the two eating dinner, they're up higher than they would be during the Alps sequence.) 

We're going to France this summer.  I know that my kids will probably roll their eyes when I recommend watching a movie from 1960.  But this is also a showcase of France.  It's also France in a very specific time in history.  We can kind of take movies like this for granted.  After all, I know that my brother-in-law uses a drone on every vacation to get that arial view.  But Lamorisse is doing this almost in a completely analogue way.  If I had to criticize the movie in an attempt to now fawn all over it so much, maybe he does that arial shot a bit too aggressively.  But it also accurately gives us that subjective lens to view the film from.  Because the two characters are in the balloon the entire time, we connect with these characters more.

And as grandiose as I'm being about the artistry of this movie, I have to give so many points for this movie being genuinely funny.  I know nothing about Maurice Baquet, but that man can do physical comedy.  It's rare to see those kind of gags outside of the Harold Lloyd / Buster Keaton era.  He does some absolutely amazing dangerous jokes that both work narratively within the movie and as jokes in themselves.  Sure, like M. Hulot, there are moments you question why he does things the way that he does things. But if this is a children's movie, which I absolutely believe that it is, no one is really questioning his methodology.  It's the joke that he's giving us and it works every time.  It's honestly one of the more impressive spectacle films that I've seen and those physical stunts are part of it.

This is a joyful movie.  I love this.  I'm probably going to be the only person who loves it, but it is so nice and so gorgeous.  Also, an hour-and-twenty-three minutes?  *chef's kiss*

Circus Angel (1965)

Two!  Two full length movies in what I thought was a collection of shorts.  I don't know how much I'm going to write about this, but it will be enough for this to have its own entry.  I would like to apologize for that abomination of a photo that I just posted.  It's difficult to find a picture from this movie that is high enough resolution.

Circus Angel somehow is great and terrible at the same time.  It doesn't really shock me that this might be one of the lesser known Albert Lamorisse movies simply because it is a bit of a mess.  The funny thing is that this might be the most traditional narrative out of all of Lamorisse's movies.  He's going for making an outright comedy here and, for the most part, succeeds.  It is actually more funny than it is a good movie.  I think my frustration really comes from the fact that the protagonist doesn't necessarily follow the tropes that we are expecting with a movie like this.  I know.  I should be all excited for a movie to defy convention, but in this case...it almost feels like a sin to sell this movie.

Fifi (and I'm just discovering that this is the character's name) is a jerk from moment one.  He's one of those lovable thieves. He steals watches and lives one of those lifestyles that could only be described as trampish.  Considering that Lamorisse is a big fan of "the easiest way is the best way", Fifi finds himself in the middle of a lion tamer's act.  Now, this is where Lamorisse steps into the world of convention.  While Fifi is objectively wrong, Billy Madison style, he's up against an unlikable bully vying for the attention of a beautiful girl.  We automatically hate the lion tamer, although from his perspective is probably doing the morally correct thing throughout this film.  

When he is given the gift (and curse!) of flight, I simply assumed that he was going to start becoming a better person.  The movie ends that way because we needed to have some kind of happy ending.  But it really does become a light switch that doesn't make a lot of sense.  I thought that the love of a woman would be the driving force to turn Fifi (pun intended) to the world of angels.  He goes from being the Birdman into something more angelic.  And while Lamorisse is somewhat teasing the concept of faith in this movie, it really does take a long time for Fifi to pick up that these people are genuinely in need of an angel.  

Maybe it's because he goes from being a lovable bad guy to a completely selfish monster.  When he falls in love, it seems like he has turned over a new leaf.  He highlights the toxic masculinity of the lion tamer / strongman and it seems like he has finally found a reason to think beyond his own selfishness.  He does work really hard to make his girl love him.  Yes, he uses immoral means to impress her by stealing a clock while the strongman, presumably, does the same act in a traditionally moral stance.  Lamorisse plays it really weird with the sequence of events that follows.  He saves a man from hanging himself (and it's a dark joke which I have to excuse to simply being the product of yesteryear).  It seems like Fifi has no reason to help this man beyond the fact that he has empathy for a man who is willing to end it all for the love of a woman.  Maybe there's a sense of brotherhood of losers with this man.  But it seems like Fifi is going to help his suicidal acquantance only to try to seduce his fiancee?  He then decides to rob the family blind all for the sheer chaos of it.

This is where Lamorisse loses me.  What these scenes are to the movie is comedy.  It's just joke telling as a flying man dressed as an angel annoys bullies, runs away from law enforcement, and does naughty things.  But it's also fundamentally against what the message of the movie was up to this point.  When Fifi goes to the circus, as much as he finds it to be a burden, he does start developing a sense of purpose.  His relationship with the acrobat seems like this whole narrative about the redemptive love of another.  But the second he gets the chance, not only does he return to a life of crime, but he escalates it.  This all climaxes when he intentionally eats of all of a starving man's food.  There's nothing all that likable about Fifi by the end of the film.  While Fifi is rescued by a family who have faith that he is an angel, this hardly seems like the transformative moment that the movie wants it to be.  If anything, it just seems like a beat.  I can almost read the chart saying, "Start closing up the movie."

Thank God the movie just takes a hard turn and makes Fifi a good man at the end.  It doesn't really make sense.  But for all of the moral shannanigans that the film throws in, all of the plot threads seem to tie together to offer solace for the crimes that this man has committed throughout the film.  It's a bit odd that the strongman is taken to prison, considering that he just sucks but is not evil. 

It's a cute movie that succeeds despite the crimes of the film.  It's not a great film.  Again, it's for the reasons that I stated above.  He's just that much of a jerk that it is hard to root for such a guy throughout the movie.  But did I enjoy it?  Yeah.  It's a funny movie that very much has that Lamorisse charm throughout the movie.  It's nice to see a movie that has a straight up story coming out of Lamorisse as well.  But I'm going to take this more of a loss than a win.