The greatest movie ever made..!

The acting in this movie is really good.

The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

This truly is one of the greatest cartoons of not only the golden age, but also of all time. All is well in a place where everything is a live balloon. That is, until the denizens' abode is invaded by the Pincushion Man. While the other characters are good, it's the aforementioned villain who really steals the show. Both he and the pins are balloons' natural enemies, and lethal enough to destroy the delicate, rubbery material of which they're made. Musically, Carl Stalling's work is fine as usual, it's an extra special treat with the addition of the uncredited novelty ragtime artist Zez Confrey's contribution to it. As one of the few Ub Iwerks cartoons not based on a fable or fairy tale, it's nice to see this attempt at something more original and it's one of the most imaginative ever conceived, and created. I can see why it's so beloved and was a contender/nominee for the 50 Greatest Cartoons Of All Time book. I'd like to think that after defeating and getting rid of the Pincushion Man, pins would hopefully be banished and outlawed for good. Recommended.

This film was included in the three DVD set "Saved From the Flames"--a collection of mostly ephemeral movies that have managed to avoid turning to powder, catching fire or melting--something that usually happened with the nitrate film stock used up through the 1950s.The first thing I noticed was how incredibly vibrant the Cinecolor was with this restored film. Audiences might think it strange to see a color film where two main colors predominate--bluish-green and orange-red. With Cinecolor and Two-Color Technicolor, three strips of film overlapped--black & white, red and green (though the Cinecolor films I have seen look a bit bluer). It's all rather primitive by today's standards, but it's nice to see a film like this with all it's vibrant color.This is set in Balloon Land--a place where all the creatures are made of balloons. Suddenly, the Pincushion Man (Billy Bletcher) appears with his pins and starts acting like a big jerk--threatening to pop everyone. Naturally, the folks are scared and run and hide. Soon the alarm is sounded and the weird little creatures of Balloon Land go on the attack--though what they can do with the Pincushion Man seems pretty dubious. Yet despite an obvious disadvantage, the balloon folks work together for a common good and save the day. I think there's supposed to be an object lesson here, but it escapes me.While compared to cartoons of the 1940s and 50s this one seems VERY old fashioned and dull, for the 1930s it's actually pretty exciting and fun. It's no where up to the standards of the stuff being produced over at Disney (where the series director, U.B. Iwerks had once worked), it's pretty good.

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.

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.