I took my first hot air balloon flight when I was but a young lad, somewhere in my early teens. Waking up at five in the morning proved the most difficult part—once I’d surmounted that hurdle, I was fully enchanted by the whimsy of it all.
The massive fabric balloon could take us up, up, and away (as the 5th Dimension so lyrically put it in 1967). It couldn’t, however, take us to a particular location. Our destination was wherever the wind whisked us. That day, we landed an hour and change after takeoff in a field of cows outside of beautiful Galena, Illinois. The cautious bovines looked at my family like we were aliens descended from another world. The farm’s owners burst out of their house and delightedly welcomed us, even joining in on the traditional safe-landing toast.
It all felt distinctly fantasy to me—flying to an unknown place in a vehicle that could go up and down, even twist in circles, but could never be steered deliberately. That feeling is precisely why I read fantasy in the first place—the author may take me to any land he or she wishes, and I’m there to enjoy the ride.
Years later—aka a few weeks ago, when I suggested writing about this topic—I had the nagging urge to discuss hot air balloons as fantasy vehicles. Here are the five examples that languidly floated into my brain…
Matilda (2022)
Netflix’s 2022 adaptation of Matilda has a unique sort of double-adaptation magic, adapting a successful Broadway musical in turn adapted from Roald Dahl’s classic book. It is woefully underappreciated, and you should watch it for many reasons, including the hot air balloon scene. Watch it above if you don’t mind minor spoilers.
Matilda’s world is dark and uneasy, dominated by a barbaric headmistress who siphons any happiness from the lives of Crunchem Hall’s young students. In “Quiet,” Matilda pines for a moment of peaceful silence and meditation. She finds it in a hammock hanging between ropes of a hot air balloon. She achieves her goal, and her attainment of inner peace gives her control over her burgeoning powers.
In Matilda, the hot air balloon is more metaphor than reality. Rather than whisking our protagonist into a fantasy world, it removes her from a dangerous and absurd fantastical setting, allowing her a moment to breathe easy.
Community
Leave it to Dan Harmon’s Community to defy all the usual sitcom expectations and instead offer viewers a deranged, genre-bending muppet episode.
The fourth season’s “Intro to Felt Surrogacy” is pure camp. The characters, unwilling to talk about something bad that happened recently, are tasked with re-enacting the experience using puppets. The opening minutes feature a very human Sara Bareilles belting a song and ushering our muppet-ified main cast onto a hot air balloon. The song begins as a jaunty but conventional upbeat ditty. The lighthearted journey quickly goes awry, however, as the crew crash lands in a forest and meets Jason Alexander, who feeds them psychotropic berries.
The juxtaposition of the opening scene and the dark turn comments on expectations and desires: What began as a hopeful journey into a whimsical unknown instead became a fearful trip that will reveal characters’ most terrible secrets (which are also delivered in song, of course).
Up
Okay, I know it’s a stretch. First off, it’s steerable. Second, it’s a whole damn house. And third, it’s held aloft by thousands of regular-sized balloons instead of one big one.
It’s all those things. But it’s also just as delightful as any of the other hot air balloons on this list, so it totally deserves a mention. Carl Fredricksen’s makeshift balloon house sets sail for Paradise Falls with Junior Wilderness Explorer Russell and adorable Golden Retriever Dug along for the ride. Carl’s house is one of my favorite hot air balloon analogs because it’s the purest form of the vehicle in its narrative purpose. He means to travel to a scenic and meaningful place. He does exactly that—then discovers the place has a darker underbelly than he’d expected.
“Hot Air Balloon” by Owl City
If you’re anywhere near my age, chances are you read “Owl City” and thought “Wow, I forgot about that guy.”
Well, I didn’t forget, and I’m here to remind you! It’s relatively rare for a song to make it on to one of these lists at Tor.com, but I think this one deserves it.
It’s hard to describe what’s so fantastical about the song “Hot Air Balloon.” The lyrics tell the story of two kids playing and using their broad imaginations, taking off in a hot air balloon of their own making. The backing track really gives it that fantasy feel, though. It’s a bubbly and whimsical take that feels like an injection of sugar and sunshine straight into your ears. Whenever the song pops on, I find myself listening to it two or three times in a row just to enjoy the escapism.
If you’re saying “huh?” to yourself about now, I don’t blame you. Listen to the song, then come back and tell me if it clicked!
The Wizard of Oz
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgbaJr77GE4
Let’s finish things off with one of the most famous films of all time. The titular wizard plans to return Dorothy to her home in Kansas via his hot air balloon. When Toto hops out of the basket and Dorothy chases after him, the balloon drifts off. The wizard, helpless, yells “I don’t know how it works!” and floats out of the frame, leaving poor Dorothy (seemingly) stranded.
Thrust into Oz by a tornado, the hot air balloon offers a solution to Dorothy’s plight, but it’s also a symbol of the Wizard’s hubris. A bit of a rascal, he’s ruled Oz by way of falsehoods and deceit, pretending to be something he’s not. His incompetence with the balloon is a sign of his inability to make meaningful change, and his blundering exit from the frame always makes me chuckle.
Luckily, Dorothy has some magical shoes that’ll get her where she needs to go without any of the Wizard’s hot air…
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Ready to take off? Fire up the burners and tell me about your favorite fantastical hot air balloons in the comments below!
Cole Rush writes words. A lot of them. For the most part, you can find those words at The Quill To Live. He voraciously reads epic fantasy and science fiction, seeking out stories of gargantuan proportions and devouring them with a bookwormish fervor. His favorite books are the Divine Cities Series by Robert Jackson Bennett, The Long Way To A Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers, and The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune.
Fred Saberhagen’s Empire of the East featured a memorable assault on a mountain fortress using balloons as transport.
I still recall The Twenty-One Balloons, by William Pène du Bois, from my youth, and I seem to recall a Tom Sawyer adventure that involved balloon travel?
@1 that would be Tom Sawyer Abroad, iirc. Rather underwhelming as I recall, never revisited it or Tom Sawyer Detective (unlike Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, both of which I have revisited more than once)
Bob Shaw’s Ragged Astronauts trilogy had some interesting balloons, but more as space stations than means of transport.
I read The Twenty-One Balloons when I was 11 and absolutely loved it. When I watched Up years later I wondered if the filmmakers knew the book; the works share a spirit of Grand Intercontinental Adventure with a flavor of Possible Tall Tale. Featuring an elderly man that everyone else has prematurely written off as ailing/feeble.
@2 lakesidey
That was it; and like you, I did not revisit it, although I have re-read both Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn more than once, also
Guess what immediately comes to mind? Around the World in Eighty Days!
@2 Upon seeing this topic, I also thought of Shaw’s Ragged Astronauts. A science fiction setting so strange it almost felt like fantasy.
π=3 in The Ragged Astronauts, so it’s definitely fantasy.
There is a Vance novel (brief research suggests it might be Big Planet) in which the balloons run along guide ropes, so they can actually be ridden to desired destinations provided the wind is right — and provided nobody is careless with the mechanisms that move the balloons from one piece of rope to the next.
Chandler’s Kelly Country uses the “Andrews Aereon“, an unpowered balloon that could nonetheless be steered; in our history it was demonstrated but not developed when the U.S. economy crashed, but Chandler makes it a part of Kelly’s ultimate victory.
The hero of Edmund Cooper’s post-crash novel The Cloud Walker gets around the opposition of the Church of Ned Ludd to build a conventional hot-air balloon; by careful launch placement, he sails over a pirate fleet that has ransacked his village, and drops enough fire bombs on the ships to break up the fleet.
Lee Scoresby’s balloon in Lyra’s world in Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” was a major plot motivator
Moving from fantasy to science fiction, there is the hot hydrogen balloon. In Clarke’s A Meeting With Medusa, it’s used because it’s in a mostly-hydrogen gas giant atmosphere. In Verne’s Five Weeks In a Balloon, it allows height control without venting gas or dropping ballast, and in Farmer’s Riverworld it allows passage over mountains designed to block standard balloons. IIRC Farmer’s characters had read the Verne story.
Riding in a hot air balloon is definitely on my bucket list, the other is introducing beaver to my smallholding.
Fantasy- the end of Baron in the Trees by Calvino.
Thriller- Whip Hand by Dick Francis.Sid escapes his enemies by joining a hot air balloon at a fairground.
SF- The War in the Air by HG Wells . It may have been a dirigible.
@5 Lovely, but it’s not in the original book by Jules Verne!
I don’t post here very often, but when I do, for some reason it’s almost always related to Neil Gaiman’s Stardust – honest, I have read other books! This time, the balloon was in the movie, lifting the lightning hunter Caspartine (in the book, it was the Free Ship Perdita – method of flight unspecified, and not as important to the plot).