Billy's Balloon

'Billy's Balloon' is sort of brilliant. It is also quite sadistic, but the more sadistic it gets the more you will probably laugh. Just do not take it too seriously. It shows how a balloon is hurting a child, Billy I guess, by lifting him up and dropping him to the floor. You might think this joke will grow old in about a minute, but this animated short, around five minutes long, invents new little things to keep us laughing.

The simple looking animation is perfect. It makes the sadistic events a little colder but at the same time it helps you realize easier that it is just an animated short. Animator Don Hertzfeldt has done a terrific job here. For something a little more disturbing, but equally good, I can recommend his 'Rejected'.

Animation in all its glory! As an animation student myself, and having made quite a few short stick-figure deaths and such to amuse myself during class, I can fully appreciate the brilliance of "Billy's Balloon." Luckily, I hadn't read anything about what was going to happen and was pleasantly surprised as the mayhem of Billy's balloon started and every time I thought the joke was getting old, a whole other element was thrown in. A great short film which I will hopefully find again someday.

This film is a hilarious story of an evil conspiracy of children's balloons. It plays a great deal off of what we expect from films like "The Red Balloon" and twists our expectations. The funniest moments come early and it could have been trimmed a bit at the end for maximum impact but don't pass this up!

This is another hilarious effort by a master animator/storyteller. A little boy sits holding a balloon. He is having fun just gooing and cooing. When suddenly the balloon turns on him. The results are absolutely hilarious and pretty sick. And absolutely hilarious.

There are few things in this ugly world which inspire me more than the resistance of those being oppressed against the oppressors themselves. We all know the type, we recognize it in our lives and in popular culture. Who doesn't love an underdog? George Washington, Che Gueverra,, and now Billy's Balloon. I recognize how important the act of rebellion and the spirit of resistance is in order for meaningful socio-political and economic change in our modern environment and culture. However, it is because of this, difficult in equal measure to denounce the oppressed turning their oppression back on their oppressors and oppressing them instead. This film is a gleeful and blithesome depiction of both of these separate but essential moments in the cycle of species-wide and generational self-destruction we collectively set out upon in our metaphorical and symbolic Garden of Eden. It is because of this universal understanding of the resistance trope that Don Hertfeldt's "BILLY'S BALLOON" works so well: it's an incredibly deft and acuitus subversion of audience expectations. We all understand that nothing is ever going to change. It's a vicious circle, or so they say. And Don Hertzfeld understands that. Make no mistake, the cartoonish violence in this film is "funny". But there is a deep, dark layer of this film frankly too rarely spoken about.