Red's Dream

Red's Dream (1987)

Red, a unicycle, dreams that he steals the show.

Life as the sole sale item in the clearance corner of Eben's Bikes can get lonely. So Red, a unicycle, dreams up a clown owner and his own juggling act that steals the show. But all too soon, the applause turns into the sound of rainfall, as reality rushes back. Red must resign himself to sitting in the corner and await his fate.

Date of release
1987-07-10
TMDB
6.1 / 10 (376)
Runtime
4m
Genres
Animation, Family
Director
John Lasseter

Interesting facts

Red's Dream is a 1987 American animated short film written and directed by John Lasseter and produced by Pixar. The short film, which runs four minutes, stars Red, a unicycle. Propped up in the corner of a bicycle store on a rainy night, Red dreams of a fantasy where it becomes the star of a circus. Red's Dream was Pixar's second computer-animated short following Luxo Jr. in 1986, also directed by Lasseter.

Production

Red's Dream was the second short film produced by computer animation studio Pixar, following Luxo Jr., the studio's previous short film. For their next short film, which was to be presented at the 1987 SIGGRAPH convention, Ed Catmull wanted the Pixar staff to make a film that made use of the Pixar Image Computer and the rendering software Chapreyes.

The film project came with two technical rationales; the bike shop scenes at the beginning and end were intended to demonstrate the rendering of highly complex imagery. Due to the geographical complexity the spoked bikes and the shop fixtures, a typical frame of animation from the scenes contained more than ten thousand geometric primitives, which in turn were made up of more than thirty million polygons.

As Red's Dream was being developed, space at Pixar was growing tight in its Marin County bungalow; during production, the animation group, consisting of Lasseter alongside several "technical directors" who created models and shaders and such, worked out of a hallway. Towards the end of production, Lasseter worked and slept in the hallways for days on end.

Shortly following the completion of Red's Dream, animators Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, two of Walt Disney's legendary original nine animators known as the "Nine Old Men", visited Lasseter at Pixar and they watched a screening. Thomas was evidently freed of his former doubts about computer animation, expressed in a 1984 essay in which he argued computer animation could never produce anything as meaningful as its hand-drawn predecessor.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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