Le Ballon Rouge [The Red Balloon] ***** (1956, Pascal Lamorisse, Sabine Lamorisse, Georges Sellier) – Classic Movie Review 7291

Writer-director Albert Lamorisse’s 1956 delightful world-famous short film The Red Balloon (Le Ballon Rouge) is legendary. Lamorisse won the 1957 Oscar for Best Writing, Best Screenplay – Original – the only person ever to have received this award for a short film. Somehow it is just great that an almost wordless short film wound up with an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. He also won the 1956 Palme d’Or for Best Short Film.

The Red Balloon (Le Ballon Rouge) is set in the atmospheric old quarters of Paris (the streets and alleys of Ménilmontant, the 20th arrondissement of Paris) and tells the charming, magically playful short fantasy tale about the touching friendship between a sweet little boy, Pascal le petit garçon (the director’s son Pascal), and his red balloon which he finds stuck to a lamp post and follows him around the streets of Paris. Drama comes when a gang of boys want to destroy the balloon. One of Pascal’s sisters, Sabine, plays the little girl with the blue balloon.

The Red Balloon is a film without dialogue that evokes a sweetly surreal and dreamlike quality through music (score by Maurice Le Roux) and vivid colours (Technicolor cinematography by Edmond Séchan). It is a beautiful and blissful 34 minutes of celluloid.

Thousands of 16-millimeter prints were distributed to schools across America, in one of the largest non-theatrical releases in movie history.

Pascal Lamorisse, who was born in Paris in 1950, described his participation in the film as pure magic. He appeared in two more of the productions of his father, who was shooting a documentary near Teheran in 1970 when he was killed in a helicopter crash.

Pascal inherited his father’s film company, Films Montsouris, and is involved the long process of film restoration.

It is therefore the only short film to win an Academy Award outside the short film categories and it is the shortest film to win a major Academy Award.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Classic Movie Review 7291

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