I first chanced upon this 1956 French film by Albert Lamorisse on TV, and ever since I've been looking for a videotape or a DVD. Once I taped it from the TV station Arte, but they started early and I missed the start.
I wanted to have it for my children and myself because it's quite simply one of the best short films I can think of. For what it's worth, the film won a Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1956, and it's the only short film ever to win an Oscar outside of the short-film categories (for Best Screenplay, against La strada, The Bold and the Brave and The Ladykillers).
I'm not going to give anything away, because a first-time watching should be entirely from scratch. It's only 38 minutes long, and it won't matter a bit if you don't understand the French (there's next to no dialogue). I found it, finally, on Google Video, thanks to the excellent site Smashing Telly.
Albert Lamorisse, by the way, also invented the board-game Risk.
5 comments:
I'll definitely check this out. I find great short films, like great short stories, to be often more rewarding than their feature-length counterparts. There's no time for lulls, nowhere to hide poor dialogue, no room for missteps. You have to make every single second count. True artistry. Thanks for the link.
I remember seeing this when I was very young- six years or younger, because we still lived in Carpentersville. I remember it because there was a restaurant near our home called the Red Balloon and I made the connection. As I recall, the lack of English didn't hurt the film at all, because there was so little dialogue in the first place.
Grapes, this is awesome - thank you! I saw this film on numerous occasions in elementary school, and always watched it enrapt (I was such a sensitive little soul in those days). It is a magnificent film, and great to have all the memories flood back as well.
BTW, it was 1965 not 1956, n'est-ce pas?
Yeah, Tim. The Google listing is wrong.
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