红气球

NO LANDMARKS The Red Balloon, took place in Paris, uses no typical symbolic meanings of this city. All the scenes that appear in this film do attach to the story, and never remind people purposely where the story took place. Looking back on the plot, it doesn’t differ the Parisian children from those from other places, it tries to touch everyone by presenting the innocence of a boy with no special characteristics so that all the people can find themselves in his image, and that’s why it is unnecessary to show landmarks of Paris. SPACE AND TIME STRUCTURE OF THE FILM If a map is made to describe this film, in the middle of it would be the stairs. Downstairs would lie the civilized world, which contains the city, streets and buses, shops and railways, and the school. Upstairs would be another world, the forgotten part of the city, the slums. It can be supposed that the boy’s home lies close to the stairs in the up side according to the movie. To draw a conclusion to the map, there are three important locations on it, the stairs and the boy’s home in the middle, school at one end and the deserted land where balloon dies on the other. The Red Balloon tells a story about the friendship between a little boy and a human-liked balloon, and it can be divided into three main parts.. The main part carrying the theme of the film is about the friendship between boy and balloon, and this is the poetry in the film. Apart from friendship are conflicts, dramatic parts of the film. Conflicts between the boy and the civilized society, for example the bus, the school and most importantly the headmaster, supports the first 18 minutes. Wild children leading the balloon to its fatal destiny support the plots in the last 12 minutes. The three types of scenes can be accurately attached to the three parts of the film. THE LINEAR SPACE AND ITS SYMBOLIC MEANINGS In the first 18 minutes the story takes place in the civilized space, and in the rest 12 minutes the deserted land becomes the stage, besides, there is a transition between them and appeared on the screen for 5 times, the stairs. With the map the audience and see that the film starts in the middle, the stairs, and then shifts between home and school, and then gradually turns to the other side of the map, upstairs, at the end of the film the boy flies highly above the whole map. There is no flash back in this film, nor narration interposed. The timeline of the film is linear. Different scenes correspond to their unique situation, and as a result to it, the spacial structure follows the timeline to be linear, which means one scene carries a pure effect on building a simple atmosphere and doesn’t have conflicting symbolic meanings. For example, the school means oppression to a child’s nature, and the deserted land means wildness to destroy a child’s innocence. With the path of the main character on the map and symbolic meanings of each location, an explanation to the film can be drawn. Human beings are born to have two conflicting identities, one relates to animal instincts, the deserted land, and one relates to social moral, the school. The boy was born just in between, behind the up side of the stairs, way of civilization. It was when the boy stepped downstairs that he found the balloon, beauty and kindness. However, highly civilized people are far from their original nature, so the balloon is not welcomed on the bus and in the school. When the boy ran away from the cathedral, he took the balloon to the wild field and went free from the sanction of adults and school, he experienced real happiness and freedom, but the wild children had waited to kill the balloon for long. Animal instincts also don’t welcome the balloon, and furthermore, they kill. This is a way to understand the film, making it like a serious fable of human civilization. Similarly, it can explain how a person grows to maturity. Obviously there are much more ways for the audience to find to understand this film, among which the most simple one can be that it is a cute film focusing on children as audiences.