White Mane and The Red Balloon.

Albert Lamorisse's White Mane and The Red Balloon are screening at New York's Film Forum through November 25 before floating out across the country in the coming weeks.

"The stories are simple, fablelike; the heroes are boys; the subject in each case is the purity and power of a child's imagination; and the tone of both films is that of open-mouthed wonder," writes Terrence Rafferty in the New York Times. "Yet these movies are also shot through with a very adult melancholy, an awareness that life tends not to measure up to the glorious pictures in our minds. The young are enchanted by White Mane and The Red Balloon. Grown-ups, who know too well how fragile this beauty is, are likely to cry."

Updated through 11/20.

"For all the seraphic beauty of the boys, neither movie resorts more than briefly to cuteness; both are escape fantasies that pay homage to the inventiveness of children in the face of dour adult oppression," writes Ella Taylor in the Voice.

The boy who "got to run around Paris followed by a magical red balloon" was Lamorisse's son, Pascal, who's now 57. Susan King talks with him for the Los Angeles Times.

Updates, 11/20: "The Red Balloon is whimsical; White Mane (a small masterpiece) touches, in 31 minutes, all the emotions of a classic coming-of-age picture about a child and a legendary animal, like National Velvet, The Yearling, or The Black Stallion," writes Steve Vineberg in the Boston Phoenix. "In both movies, the object of the boy's affection is an embodiment of the spirit of childhood that can't be constrained by the traditions of bourgeois society (in Red Balloon) or repressed by the machinations of the self-interested, mercenary adult world (in White Mane)."

"There are some things you should never be too old to experience, and The Red Balloon is one of them," writes Dennis Harvey at SF360. "With very little dialogue and boundless charm, The Red Balloon transcends all cultural barriers - despite the flavorful specificity of its Paris setting."

Posted by dwhudson at November 18, 2007 4:14 AM