Two Balloons is a 2018 short stop-motion animated film about two adventurous lemurs who navigate their dirigibles halfway around the world to a place where happenstance and fate threaten to disrupt their reunion.
It would be almost impossible not to bring up stop-motion animation right now and now mention Wes Anderson‘s brilliant Isle of Dogs, his second foray into the medium, however he’s obviously not the only filmmaker producing what many thought would be a lost art in the shadow of CGI. Nick Park is a pioneer who is still churning out some of the most innovative in the genre. But on smaller scales, independent artists have made short film a home to the art form and the latest is Mark C. Smith. Two Balloons is a whimsical fairytale up in the sky and it’s a charming, dialogue-free escape into a wonderfully nostalgic and colorful world of romance and enduring hope.
Aboard a small dirigible, this an airship with a sailboat as its cabin, a lonely lemur plots a course over deep water with aims to rendezvous with another. It’s a long journey, as the stacks of provisions piled on shelves attest, but he has some company, that of a gull who flits about in search of tasty apple wedges. Meanwhile, he searches the skies for her, a lemur in an aerostat much like his, coming to meet him halfway.
At just over 8 minutes, Two Balloons is a swift but stirring tale of love, its music as important as its imagery, the delightful score and highly-creative visuals traveling us along into a richly realized fantasy of incredible detail and wondrous metaphor. These ships in the sky face all kinds of majesty and mayhem, telling us much about the odyssey that is love and the courage of what it means to work together in trust and hope.
Like any in the genre, it’s the attention to the small things that make animation like this so special, the value of reality grounded in a place of make-believe. That is ever-so-carefully brought to bear here with this years-in-the-making project from the Portland, Oregon-based animation team1 – filling the screen with treasures that force your eyes to all corners. From the teapot steaming on the stove to the tufts of clouds wafting under their hulls, this is a marvel of details.
There’s not a word spoken, the mood carried by its tunes, making this rife with interpretation, even if the larger themes seem clear. It’s a film that even after watching more than once still has secrets to reveal, ones perhaps we each will find differently. I found myself strangely bound to these little creatures and their quest, their need to be together and the lengths they have traveled to be so, surprisingly weighty. It has this storybook quality it to, like the pages of lovingly-illustrated children’s book have come to life and this had me wishing that my brief time with them were longer.