I had read great reviews of this movie a while back and was so excited when i saw it in the tv guide. What a disappointment.

Unless you’ve seen this movie as a child, chances are you won’t see the appeal. It’s a very average movie about a boy whose balloon follows him everywhere. The concept is cute AT FIRST, but after 20 minutes of the same damn thing, you’re hoping someone will put the balloon (or yourself) out of its misery. It’s difficult to make a successful film when you find no reason to care about it’s characters, like this little boy who we know absolutely nothing about. However, on the upside, it is quite aesthetically pleasing, and the best part of all…it’s only an hour:)

… Nonetheless, for those of us who were born in the 60s, there’s one factor, above all others, that forged our contempt : The Red Balloon. We are the lost generation that had to sit through this godawful flick in some stinking grade school auditorium every time that it rained and we weren’t allowed out on the playground for recess.

I don’t recall, but I suppose the first time we saw it we may have even thought it was mildly cute. It’s fairly harmless–a little kid is followed all around some miserable, bombed out, French city by a vibrantly colored red balloon that he finds tied to a lamppost. It eludes the grasp of others, but bobs and weaves all over the place so that the boy can tow it around. After disrupting school and church it is finally hunted down by a gang of nearly feral French schoolchildren who stone it to death. There follows the obligatory resurrection (the balloon having previously been immaculately conceived and crucified) as the boy is transported heavenwards by a host of balloons. Hard to believe then how grating these 34 minutes of celluloid become by the end of the first viewing, never mind on the umpteenth. We used to sit in the dark and pray that just this one time someone would burst the balloon in the first few minutes and save us from misery. To no avail…