Hot Air Balloons in Books and Movies
Hot air balloons are a 18th-century invention that has allowed people to fly and travel around, even go to space, all before planes, helicopters, or spaceships were ever invented. This means that they've been in popular culture for almost 250 years, and their representations in books and movies up to this day are numerous. Get to know the books and movies that use hot air balloons in their plots!
Some very many movies and books use hot air balloons in their plots, whether for one fantastical scene or as their "main character". There are also books that have been adapted into movies and they translate the magic of a hot air balloon from the written word to the big screen! It's hard to find every single piece of media that has used these legendary aircraft, but here we make a compilation of some of the most known representations of hot air balloons in books and movies.
Books made into movies
Around the World in 80 Days
One of the better-known stories that utilizes a Hot Air Balloon comes from French author Jules Verne's Around the World in 80 Days. This book tells the story of Phileas Fogg, a wealthy 19th-century gentleman living in London, who bets £20,000 (half his fortune) that he can make a trip around the world in 80 days. With a French companion, Passepartout, they take a train from London to Suez, Egypt; a steamer to Bombay, India; a train to Calcutta, India; a steamer to Victoria, Hong Kong; a pilot boat to Shanghai; a steamer to Yokohama, Japan; a paddle-steamer to San Francisco, United States; a transcontinental train to New York that gets interrupted, so they end up taking a wind-powered sled to Omaha; a steamboat headed to Bordeaux, France but that ends up taking them to Queenstown, Ireland, finally, they take a series of trains to get back to London.
Indeed, in the fantastical story written by Verne, there is no hot air balloon. However, many radio, theatre, and of course, Film adaptations of the book have been made. Both the 1956 film adaptation with David Niven and Cantinflas and the 2004 film adaptation with Jackie Chan and Steve Coogan feature a hot air balloon as one of the ways Phileas Fogg completed his 80-day trip around the world.
You can also find Mysterious Island by Eduard Pentslin, a 1941 Russian adaptation of another of Jules Verne's books in which five POWs escape a camp in a hot air balloon and try to survive on an uninhabited island in the Pacific Ocean.
The Wizard of Oz
Oh yes, the craze for Oz started in book form with L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1900. The children's fantasy book was adapted in 1939 by Victor Fleming and it starred Judy Garland, Frank Morgan, Ray Bolger, and many more stars of the time. This film relates the story of Dorothy's trip to the wonderful and magical land of Oz, where she meets a band of misfits who all lack something deep in their beings, and who in the end, find it in unlikely places. Mainly, hot air balloons seem to be the way in and out of Oz in this story.
This movie, according to the U. S. Library of Congress, is the most seen movie in history and the story has been adapted to radio, theatre, animation, and musicals. Ever since this first film adaptation, there have been many others, including Oz the Great and Powerful, directed by Sam Raimi and starring James Franco, Michelle Williams, and Mila Kunis; and of course, the latest reprisal: Wicked directed by Jon Chu and starring Cynthia Ervo, Ariana Grande, and Jonathan Bailey, which if I'm not wrong, is the movie adaptation of a play adapted from a movie adapted from a book (phew!).
James Bond
Yes, 007 himself has been seen using a hot air balloon on one of his adventures! In Octopussy (1983), with Roger Moore as James Bond and Maud Adams as Octopussy, this famous secret agent uses a hot air balloon to position himself in the Monsoon Palace assault. And in The World is Not Enough (1999), with Pierce Brosnan as James Bond and Sophie Marceau as Elektra King, a hot air balloon is featured in a very dramatic scene, almost finishing the man himself.
The Aeronauts
This movie, starring Felicity Jones and Eddie Redmayne, is based on the book Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air by Richard Holmes. The book depicts the brave men and women who have taken to the sky, whether for scientific, curious, or more sinister purposes. It explains why they took the chance to take to the skies, what their contemporaries thought of them, and what it took for them to get there, as well as what their flights revealed about the planet and the human beings who took them.
Now, the film focuses on the story of a daring pilot, Amelia Wren, and a weather scientist, James Glaisher who band together to take a flight on the largest hot air balloon ever constructed. Both characters have doubts and pasts they have to deal with before leaping into this great adventure that turns wrong when they run into a violent storm that injures James. The adventure continues nonetheless and these unlikely heroes achieve a flight altitude record of 11.300 meters (37.000 feet). The movie is based on a combination of the stories described by Holmes in his book that director Tom Harper and writer Jack Thorned mixed into one coherent story that captivated audiences.
Movies
Now, you'd be hard-pressed to find every time a hot air balloon that has been featured in a film. However, the wonderful big-screen productions that have shown hot air balloons to the wider public started as early as 1912, with James Young's The Unusual Honeymoon, which depicts a couple of newlyweds, Thomas and Mary, who take to the village fair for a tethered hot air balloon flight that gets derailed by a pair of mischievous boys; they fly away and encounter a tribe of cannibals who treat them as gods from the skies, for a while. You can also find the 1926 short, Alice's Balloon Race, a Walt Disney production that depicts 4 contestants in a hot air balloon competition who suffer different obstacles to reach the $10,000 reward.
The productions continue all over the 1940s and 50s with All's Fair at the Fair, a Popeye reprisal starring Jack Mercer, Mae Questel, and Jackson Beck as the voices of Popeye, Olive Oyl, and Bluto, the daring hot air balloon rider who tries to "steal" Olive from Popeye. There's also Kind Hearts and Coronets by Robert Hamer in 1950, and The Secret of the Magic Island by Jean Tourane in 1956, both comedies with many different elements and a hot air balloon in their midst.
And since the 1960s, there have been at least a few hot air balloon movies every decade, such as 1961's Flight of the Lost Balloon by Nathan Juran, 1978's Olly, Olly, Oxen Free by Richard A. Colla and with Katharine Hepburn, 1987's The Chipmunk Adventure by Janice Karman, 1991's Mannequin Two: On the Move by Edward Rugoff, and 2004's Enduring Love by Roger Mitchell and with Daniel Craig, Rhys Ifans, and Samantha Morton.
It seems that hot air balloons hit every emotional queue, from comedy to drama, mystery, adventure, and also serious science, and their depiction on the big screen is a phenomenon that won't soon stop.
Books
And if you'd have difficulty finding all the movies that show hot air balloons, imagine having 2 and a half centuries of books that might depict them! We know now that one of the most popular authors to ever use hot air balloons in their writing was Jules Verne, who wrote not one, but three different books that depict these curious aircraft in them.
However, it seems that the romantics, meaning writers from the late 18th century, had a bit of an obsession with hot air balloons. Thomas Baldwin's Airopaidia (1786) seems to be the first record of images and text of the wonderful experience of flying in a hot air balloon. And Ballooners (as the hot air balloon pilots were called) became sort of travel writers, describing the feelings and views from the sky for those unable to live them in real life.
But hot air ballooning has been featured in books multiple times since. Some of the most well-known books (aside from the ones mentioned earlier) are: The Subtle Knife (1997) by Phillip Pullman, the second in the His Dark Materials series; The Twenty-One Balloons (1947) by William Pène du Bois, a children's book about a hot air balloon ride gone awry; The Cloud Atlas (2004) by Liam Callanan, not the one turned into a movie with Halle Berry and Tom Hanks, but a historical fiction about a young soldier sent to defuse Japanese hot air balloon bombs, and even Curious George and Hot Air Balloons (1998) by Margaret Rey which features a hot air balloon flight in Mount Rushmore!
There are hundreds, if not thousands, of hot air balloon-related books and movies out in the world, which goes to show how much these whimsical and strange vehicles have fascinated us human beings since their invention in 1783. If these incredible machines interest you as they surely have many authors, poets, scientists, filmmakers, and everyday people, you can read about the history of hot air balloons.
And if you want to live through your own balloon adventure in your city or somewhere you'll be traveling soon, don't hesitate to check out Manawa's hot air balloon activities! You'll be sure to find an activity to help you live through what these movies and books describe.