Albert Lamorisse’s The Red Balloon (1956) is a contender for the greatest short film of all time. Lamorisse is often overlooked in discussions of the French New Wave, including by his peers, and his other, sparse works, Bim, the Little Donkey (1951), White Mane (1953), Stowaway in the Sky (1960), and Circus Angel (1965), are just as influential to cinema, but are forgotten, just like their largest audience so often is in serious discussion of cinema: children.
“You know what? The real paradise? It’s here.”
Released in December 2023, The Red Balloon and Other Stories: Five Films by Albert Lamorisse is the rare Criterion Collection box appropriate for and essentially aimed at children, though Lamorrisse always insisted that he aimed for all ages.
Lamorrisse’s films are largely dialogue-free, with French and English dubs easily accessed and switched between in the moment depending on the reading level of the child. These are stories told through image and score, often “looney-tuning” the action musically, though here the parroting of score and action is a feature, not a bug.
Of course, many of the stunts and images would be considered unethical to capture today (you cannot believe the stunts children perform on racing horseback), but that also adds to the wonder of these films. These images were safely captured, and they’ll never be captured like that again, only restored and reexamined as follows:
DISC ONE
Pascal Lamorisse in Alber Lamorrisse’s 1956 short film THE RED BALLOON. Image courtesy of Janus Films.]
The Red Balloon is the only short film to ever win the Oscar for Best Screenplay, an even more amazing feat when you realize how little of it includes a spoken word. The anti-structural screenplay voting body of today would never reward something this pure. I rented this on VHS from the public library when I was 5 years old and I’ve never forgotten it, though its stunning, muted Technicolor did fade from my mind over time. A fun game to play is to ask people what they remember about this masterpiece and count how many people remember it as being in black and white except for the red balloon. It’s not. It’s in full living color and always has been. It’s simply one of the best color-spotting jobs ever done in the history of film development. Not just a technical tour-de-force, it’s one of the purest distillments of childhood in any medium. 5 stars.
L-R: The uncredited actors for Abdallah and Messauod in Alber Lamorrisse’s 1951 short feature BIM, THE LITTLE DONKEY. Image courtesy of Janus Films.
Bim, the Little Donkey is Lamorisse’s first narrative film, telling the story of two young boys, one rich and one poor, fighting over the beautiful donkey Bim in a town where every child has their own donkey like they were raised in Pallet Town. It’s sweet and enthralling with a refreshingly low (but not non-existent) exoticism of its Tunisian setting for the time. It’s the first of Lamorrisse’s films to make you fear for a child’s life as the actors climb walls, terraces, and buildings on camera. There’s a full 90-second action sequence dedicated to a thief throwing children off a moving sailboat into the actual ocean. It’s metal as hell.
The restorations on these discs all generally look great, but 12:30 into this film’s run time, there is an atrociously denoised or upscaled shot of the little prince Messaoud that looks out straight out of the waxy-skinned Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003) remaster. 4 stars.
Alain Emery in Alber Lamorrisse’s 1953 feature film WHITE MANE. Image courtesy of Janus Films.
White Mane is generally considered Lamorrisse’s other masterpiece besides The Red Balloon and is a magnificent entry in the “wow, horses are cool” movie canon.
This fable follows a young boy who seeks to tame a wild white horse on the plains of Camarque, France. White Mane, like the Black Beauty stories, is a moving story about the bond between man and beast, elevated to glorious heights by Lamorrisse’s direction. The cinematography is special, creating white-on-white imagery often unexplored in black-and-white cinema. Again, the stunts are impeccable, particularly a sequence where Alain Emery (Glamador, Portrait of Alain Emery: The Child Who Did Not Know How to Smile) is seemingly dragged behind the horse through a reedy marsh for a shockingly long time. Just astounding stuff. 5 stars.
The Disc One supplements include a brand new interview with Lamorrisse’s son Pascal, the star of The Red Balloon and The Stowaway in the Sky. Titled “The Soul of an Artist: Pascal Lamorisse on Albert Lamorisse”, this all-English extra discusses Lamorrisse’s creative process, career path, the invention of the Helivision, and the fatal helicopter crash that took Lamorisse from the world too soon. There are also two archival televised appearances by Albert Lamorrisse. In the first he discusses his films with a moderator and a panel of children, and, in the second, he introduces a televised broadcast of White Mane and The Red Balloon. These interviews provide insight into the imaginative artist not just technically but philosophically, as he not only discusses his life and films, but also plays a magic trick on the children and attempts to convince them of movie magic instead of honestly answering their questions about special effects.
“If I could create the world, I would do it differently.”
DISC TWO
Pascal Lamorrisse in Alber Lamorrisse’s 1960 feature film STOWAWAY IN THE SKY. Image courtesy of Janus Films.
By my money, Stowaway in the Sky is Lamorrisse’s real feature-length masterpiece. How does the creative vision behind The Red Balloon bring it to the next level? A BIGGER BALLOON! A giant hot-air balloon is the central setting of this film, but the real star is Lamorisse’s “Helivision,” the multi-axis gimbal he invented that defined aerial cinematography for decades.
A whimsical yet melancholy exploration of France by sky, Stowaway in the Sky follows Pascal Lamorisse once again as his inventor grandfather, played by André Gille (The Fenouillard Family, Le mouton), attempts to prove that aeronauts still have a place in the 1960s, charting a path around the country with his new balloon thruster system. Even the interior of the balloon basket is not shot through rear projection but via a set attached to the side of a helicopter like a motorcycle sidecar. It’s madman filmmaking at its finest.
Showcasing sky-view images that remain breathtaking, if less novel today, Stowaway in the Sky is my new #1 dream to see projected on film or digitally converted to laser IMAX. Elegant in its simplicity, gorgeous in execution, the crashing waves of time break against its stellar final shot. 5 stars.
Philippe Avron in Alber Lamorrisse’s 1965 feature film CIRCUS ANGEL. Image courtesy of Janus Films.]
Following up Stowaway in the Sky is Circus Angel, the most grown-up of Lamorrisse’s films and the least seen. The film follows an accidental clown, a total idiot, who stupidly agrees to donning angel wings implanted at the shoulder blade. On a quest to earn the love of Mireille Nègre’s circus rider, Philippe Avron (All About Loving, Idiot in Paris) uses his wings and charms to outwit his rival the lion tamer, played by Henri Lambert (L’ange Noir, Les Colonnes Du Ciel).
“I’m an angel, it doesn’t count.”
When I was a child, the news that 20th Century Fox had finally “figured out” how to bring Warren Worthington, “The Angel,” to the big screen for X-Men: The Last Stand (2006) was a major story in the local paper. If only they’d known earlier that the French pulled it off in 1965 with some piano wire and a prayer. This charming, big-action comedy is so committed to practical filmmaking that in one moment when Phillippe is taking too long to physically scale a real cliffside unassisted, the film uses several jump cuts to speed him along. It’s stupendously old-school.
While one of Lamorrisse’s less-beloved works, it’s still a great time, and he enjoyed it enough that he was set to make a sequel starring Pascal as Phillipe’s son, if not for the premature end of his life and career. 4 stars.
My Father Was a Red Balloon (2008) is the only extra on this disc. A 52-minute documentary that follows the now 57-year-old Pascal as he tells his daughter Lysa stories about his father and his movies; it’s a poorly made film elevated by its fascinating subject. Through Pascal’s stories, the family-business nature of Albert Lamorisse’s films becomes strikingly clear. This was a family that joyously worked together to make movies. It’s the contrast between the present longing and past joy that makes the film worth the watch.
Pascal was a young man when his father died, and he was present, the sole bystander, when Lamorisse and cinematographer Guy Tabary’s (Stowaway in the Sky, Figures in a Landscape) helicopter crashed while filming The Lover’s Wind (1978) for the king of Iran. Once an aspiring filmmaker, Pascal talks about how cinema had given his family everything, only to take it all away. Instead, he became a musician and photographer. Walking the streets of Paris with a rainbow umbrella and a digital handicam display showing paused videotape of his father’s films, Pascal strikes an incredibly poignant figure. It is a shame that such a vulnerable and honest subject was not supported by a better documentarian, but the sequences about his father’s death, his own therapeutic experiments in film editing, and the recontextualization of The Stowaway in the Sky retain their power despite the handicap. Children will find this one dull, and maybe so will you. 3 stars.
THE BOX
The Red Balloon and Other Stories comes in a cardboard slipcase with a duel disc layout and inserted pamphlet. The pamphlet contains an exhaustive and good essay on Lamorisse’s filmography by David Cairns titled “Head in the Clouds,” as well as some informational writing on each film. Coated in imagery from the films, this box set is colorful and impeccably art-directed. The front cover illustration by F. Ron Miller is perfect. Holding it in your hand, it feels like a high-end children’s toy or book, the kind of idealized object you could imagine stumbling upon in the cinematic version of FAO Schwarz that lives in our imagination.
The life and filmography of Albert Lamorisse were too short and are too often forgotten. The Red Balloon remains one of the greatest contributions France or anyone has ever given to cinema, and the rest can stand against many a venerated artist’s work as well. Full of innocence and earnest joy, visual purpose, and youthful risk, his films were not made exclusively for children, but they are beloved by them. There is a great honor in voicing the pain of adulthood clearly to a theater full of other adults, but there is a majesty in doing that for a child, and Lamorisse should stand tall among those royal few, the artists of collective childhood. And now, that childhood can be found in a single box.
Though it is exceedingly rare to find not just a Criterion, but a Criterion packaging design that would appeal to a small child, here it sits on my shelf, ready for the next child who accompanies their parent to my home. I’ll be leaving it out for them.
The Red Balloon and Other Stories: Five Films by Albert Lamorisse Special Features:
- New 4K digital restorations of The Red Balloon and White Mane and new 2K digital restorations of Bim, the Little Donkey; Stowaway in the Sky; and Circus Angel, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
- U.S. English-language version of Bim, the Little Donkey
- New interview with actor Pascal Lamorisse, director Albert Lamorisse’s son
- My Father Was a Red Balloon, a 2008 documentary featuring Pascal Lamorisse and his daughter Lysa
- French television interviews with Albert Lamorisse from 1957 and 1959
- English narrations for White Mane, by Peter Strauss, and Stowaway in the Sky, by Jack Lemmon
- English-dubbed track for Circus Angel
- New English subtitle translation and English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- PLUS: An essay by critic David Cairns
- New cover by F. Ron Miller
Available on Blu-ray and DVD December 12th, 2023.
For more information, head to the official The Criterion Collection The Red Balloon and Other Stories: Five Films by Albert Lamorisse webpage.
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Categories: Home Release, Home Video, Recommendation, Reviews
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