Balloon Land

This is a visually impressive cartoon, which should be expected from an Iwerks cartoon. As plots go, this was actually a pretty intricate one for the Iwerks studio, with a great villain voiced by a Disney regular, Billy Bletcher, who did Pegleg Pete, among others. The funniest bit for me was the town's "alarm" system. The Pincushion Man is really the most interesting character in the short, but it does offer some entertaining moments and is genuinely tense and frightening in spots. Iwerks deserves more notice and credit for what he had a responsibility for at Disney. His stint running his own studio wasn't as successful as he would have hoped, but he did produce (with an incredibly talented team, as a glance at the names of his employees will attest) some very good shorts. Balloon Land is one of the best that the Iwerks Studio created. Well worth watching. Recommended.

"Tickles me the way they rate me!"-- The Pincushion Man.

And how WOULD you rate the Pincushion Man? He's a man made of pins, and he lurks in the woods outside of Balloon Land. Now, he does not like the Balloon People. In fact, from birth the Balloon People are warned against this evil dweller. Of course, once in Balloon Land, the deep-voiced villain goes on an alarmingly cheerful rampage.

Dark, horrific, but very intriguing. This is well worth watching, but it may traumatize you! Just take heart, and realize that the Pincushion Man is not real and you are not a balloon. The voice work is very well done, as is the animation. The Pincushion Man is easily up there on a list of top cartoon villains.

The glorious early cartoons of Ub Iwerks (he's the man who made Mickey Mouse move) make up for their lack of Disneyesque fluidity with a determined, and often startling, inventiveness. The story is quite conventional, and can be found in different guises in the medieval folk and fairy tales from which the film takes its visual cue. A young boy disregards his elders' advice about the safety of society, and goes into the woods with his girlfriend, clearly a metaphor for sexual pleasure. However, nature proves a rapacious shelter, and the couple are chased by a murderer who manages to invade their village and go on a killing rampage.

What makes this cartoon strange and different is that the characters and settings are made entirely, as the title suggests, of balloons. Iwerks' introduction of this fantasy world is masterly and brightly coloured, replete with balloon Laurel and Hardy, and Chaplin. It's not quite fantasy, however. The hero and his girl are created and given breath by an inventor and his machine; he warns them that they are mere air, and easily destroyed. On the one hand, this is a conservative message about the dangers of transgressing family and society, a danger which is chillingly realised.

On the other, the story is a fantastic dramatisation of what used to be called the human condition - we are just as vulnerable as balloons to the vagaries of chance and inhospitable nature; we too have been breathed into life by a creator who has left us so vulnerable, and whom we cannot satisfy whether we obey or disobey him. The Pin-killer is all destructive demon, though, gleefully revelling in his homicidal spirits, free, but sadly vulnerable too.

In a film of such wit and visual imagination, it would be difficult to select an enduring image, but there is one scene where the hero sounds the alarm, a cot of four babies whose bottles he swipes - the resulting din would wake the dead, and, as if following this idea, Iwerks zooms into one of the infants' bawling mouth, a terrifying glimpse of the abyss in a new-born child, a perfect encapsulation of the film's theme.

Balloon Land (1935)

*** 1/2 (out of 4)

The title refers to a land where everything from the houses to the people are made out of balloons. The people are trained to fear the Pincushion Man because he can obviously kill them. Two newly formed kids decide to test that theory by going into the woods where the Pincushion Man follows them home and starts to terrorize the community. This two-strip Technicolor short from U.B. Iwerks is actually an incredibly dark little picture considering that the entire subject deals with the possible death of these people and there's a sequence where the Pincushion Man goes on a murdering rampage through the city. This was certainly a highly entertaining film thanks in large part to the characters who were either lovable (the balloon people) or downright hated (Pincushion Man). Another very big positive was the wonderful colors used for everyone. I watched this with my son and he said they looked like ICEE colors and he was pretty much correct.

Ub Iwerks, the man who helped create Mickey Mouse, was not a success as owner of his own studio, although his output was of a consistently high quality. This is one of his better cartoons from that period which provides a fine example of his lively imagination. The film opens with a deceptively light-hearted sequence in which we are treated to balloon versions of comic icons Laurel & Hardy and Chaplin and also see balloon children being born in Balloon Land. Things turn much darker, however, when two of the kids venture out into the forest, disregarding their elder's advise to stay away from the pin cushion man, a truly frightening creation.

The juxtaposition of gaily coloured, cheerfully drawn balloon characters being popped to death at the hands of the devilish pin cushion man is certainly incongruous, but adds an edge to a cartoon that could so easily have gone the way of Walt Disney's far more soppy Silly Symphonies. It's a shame Iwerks didn't succeed as an independent - you can't help feeling that his imagination was never really given free rein once he returned to the Disney Studios following the collapse of his own studio.