Triumph of the Spirit

Rating: 10/10 (13 August 2009)

This is a wonderful film that manages to work as a children's adventure flick and a serious allegory all at the same time. The animation is beautiful but the characters steal the show, and the most important character of all is the spirit of the old man's late wife as embodied in the balloons levitating his house. The old man spends the whole film literally attached to the house, flying it around with ropes and pulleys and dragging it down to the ground with a garden hose while the balloons are trying to pull it away from him. The more he hangs on the more he suffers, and he only regains his happiness when he finally lets it go. It's a Buddhist parable, and the sort of thing you'd expect to see in a French surrealist film. But Pixar has pulled it off in a kid's cartoon!!! You can't beat that: 10 out of 10.