Thursday, 20 June 2002 | The red balloon

At A/V Geeksmovie night tonight I saw a film that I hadn't seen since I was 6? 7? about a shiny red balloon that follows a little French boy around Paris until the balloon gets popped by some little French bullies. When it dies, exhaling its insides slowly until a little brown shoe hurries it along, all of the other balloons in town escape from their owners, come find the little boy, and together they carry him away over the city.

I'm not sure what the message of the film was supposed to be, and I'm not sure why I was so pleased to have those grainy images come to life again in my brain. Certainly good memories are worth keeping, but why do I enjoy filling in the blanks of neutral childhood memories? I could almost hear a bell of recognition every time my brain saw a segment it knew.

Tonight all of the films had the theme: "Baffling educational films that warped a whole generation of little kiddies' minds." The other films were less coherent and not as well done, and none of those I had seen. One had the moral that if you're not loved, you might die. For the intro to the film, a morose little boy climbs off the school bus alone and falls dead into the snow. In another, a mime plays hide-and-seek with a string of children who hide in badly chosen places—trunks of cars, old refrigerators, sewage pipes—and they're never seen again. It seems we're lucky that we've made it this far.