SPOILER ALERT: if you haven't seen the movie yet and care about being spoiled, stop reading

The Red Balloon (Le Ballon Rouge) is a 1956 film by Albert Lamorisse.

the plot is very simple, a boy finds a red balloon and befriends it. the balloon is red like the title suggests and it has some kind of consciousness, being aware of it's surroundings and able to move around. (which also makes me remember of Tulpas, Golems, elementals, etc. the balloon being the physical body of a server the boy created)

from there we can already see the consciousness the kid (Pascal) is working with, Gevurah, that is, discipline, justice.

we can also understand the red as the kid working his Philosopher stone on the rubedo state, the reddening phase of the alchemical process

the contrast between the discipline needed towards school and home and the free spirit the kid has while playing with the balloon is very apparent, again showing it's basically the consciousness he's working at the moment

in the beginning, Pascal still believes it needs to hold into the balloon to keep it, only to realize after letting go of it when getting home that the balloon came back and listen to his commands, eventually following him

everyone is obviously amazed by it, specially his school colleagues

the two paths that start from Geburah are Lamed (12th Arcana, The Hanged Man) and Mem (13th Arcana, Death) and in the movie there's this constant small sacrifices the kid makes to keep the balloon with him, like on the beginning where he misses the bus and has to walk to school and home and afterwards when he's prevented from being on class because the balloon presence is causing the kids to be chaotic

the self awareness of the ballon keeps increasing, as we can see on the scene where it looks itself on the mirror

in a quick scene, him and his red balloon encounter a girl who's playing with a blue balloon, here we see Gevurah meeting Chesed, the two columns, magnetism and electricity and a slight play / flirt between them

some kids try to take the balloon from him, but he manages to let go of it and get it back

his mom takes him to church but again the balloon makes him go away

Pascal becomes overconfident and eventually some boys are able to steal the balloon, trying to throw rocks at it, the tension increases until the balloon finally "dies"

and then something incredible happens, all balloons from the city (of different colors) start to fly around towards him eventually coming together and making him fly, showing after he finished working with that consciousness he was ready to ascend using all the spheres

two main points we can take from this movie:

• don't attach yourself to specific spheres, ideally you'll be able to work with all of them at the same time. while that isn't possible, make sure to work one well and move onto the next
• Pascal's passion was the balloon and he didn't let anything get in his way of keeping it, not school, not his mom, not church, not other kids wanting to take it from him and so on and at the end he reaped the benefits of his determination. something a lot of people don't do nowadays because they're so busy with things others programmed them into believing they should be doing