Now that my daughter is five my wife and I decided to look at the new DVD of The Red Balloon to see if it would be appropriate for her. The answer: definitely not! Seeing it again after many years (it was often shown in grade schools, usually in inferior 16 mm. prints) convinces me that it scared people away from foreign films, just as "The Nutcracker" scared people away from ballet and George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss scared high school students away from literature: they represent very limited fragments of what film, literature and dance have to offer, and not in the best way.
In The Red Balloon a young boy, probably about six, wanders around Paris with a red balloon following him. The boy goes everywhere alone, taken care of to a limited extent by an elderly woman, no father or mother around. Eventually other children destroy the red balloon and other balloons, of all colors, come together and lift the boy up into the sky. The story makes no sense at any level, not even the mythopoeic, but is seen as an introduction to foreign films, for children, a sort of Antonioni film, without the intelligence, for toddlers; it's only thirty-five minutes long, with only a few words of dialogue. That the story can be seen and interpreted in many different ways and has no meaning of its own demonstrates its condescension and artistic bankruptcy.
Most movies made for children don't work artistically for children or adults (I'm talking about you, Disney, as well as many others). My family will continue to watch Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin and Chuck Jones, artists who appeal to all ages, in multiple ways at multiple levels.
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