Red Balloon & White Mane
Albert Lamorisse’s films talk directly to our hearts with beautiful pictures and little words. Behind the simplest stories, these post-WWII films (featuring the director’s own son Pascal and stunning Alain Emery) contain the director’s complex feelings about the war, good vs evil, and the future that the post-war children had to rebuild.
In 2011, the hardest year for Japan, we’d like to deliver these films filled with love for children and life that they signify as our gift to Japanese children, wishing for their wonderful and cheerful futures filled with dreams. –From the Co-organizers of UPAF
Moving Magical Experiences After Many Viewings
Directed by Albert Lamorisse, these two short films featuring the director’s son Pascal contain stunning cinematography, minimal dialogue and beautiful storylines.
In White Mane: The Wild Horse (34 mins, 1953) the real star is a free-spirited white stallion who refuses to be tied down in the same way that the luminescent red balloon in Lamorisse’s Academy Award-winning follow-up The Red Balloon (36 mins, 1956) cannot be constrained. Filmed in a picture postcard Paris, a little boy discovers this is one balloon with a mind of its own.
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Albert Lamorisse’s exquisite The Red Balloon remains one of the most beloved children’s films of all time. In this deceptively simple, nearly wordless tale, a young boy discovers a stray balloon, which seems to have a mind of its own, on the streets of Paris. The two become inseparable, yet the world’s harsh realities finally interfere. With its glorious palette and allegorical purity, the Academy Award–winning The Red Balloon has enchanted movie lovers, young and old, for generations. —The Criterion Collection
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After several cowboys fail, a boy tames a beautiful white horse in White Mane, part of a double bill of enchanting French films about children. In The Red Balloon, a boy spends a magical afternoon with a red balloon that follows him across Paris. Albert Lamorisse directed this charming story and cast his then-6-year-old son, Pascal, in the lead role, creating a memorable fable about friendship and loss.
French filmmaker, screenwriter and producer, Albert Lamorisse was born January 13, 1922 in Paris, France. He is best remembered for making the exquisite short The Red Balloon (1956), starring his son Pascal. It is a whimsical fantasy in which a French boy is befriended by a magical red balloon. The short earned him both a grand prize at Cannes and an American Oscar. Lamorisse started out as a photographer and began making short films in the late 1940s. The poetic simplicity of his short- and medium-length films gained him an international reputation. His 1952 short, White Mane, an account of how a young boy gentles an untameable wild white stallion, also took top prizes at Cannes and the American Oscars. He unsuccessfully tried his hand at feature-length films in the early ‘60s and then returned to making short documentaries. Tragically, while making The Lover’s Wind (1970) in Tehran, Lamorisse was killed in a helicopter crash. Using his production notes, the film was edited and released in 1978 and earned him a posthumous Oscar for “Best Feature Documentary.” —allmovie guide