Red's Dream (1987)

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.

Red's Dream is more strongly character driven than Luxo Jr., Pixar's previous short film. The short was designed to demonstrate new technical innovations in imagery. The short was created by employing the company's own Pixar Image Computer, but the computer's memory limitations led the animation group to abandon it for further projects. Space was growing tight at the company, and as a result, Lasseter and his team worked out of a hallway during production, where Lasseter sometimes slept for days on end.

The short film debuted at the annual SIGGRAPH conference in Anaheim on July 10, 1987, and received general enthusiasm from its attendants. Red's Dream was never attached to any later Pixar feature, unlike many other early Pixar short films. The short was later released in theaters with Home on the Range in 2004. It also saw release for home video as part of Tiny Toy Stories in 1996 and Pixar Short Films Collection, Volume 1 in 2007.

Storyline

On a rainy night in an unnamed, deserted city where no one can be seen, a red unicycle named Red is lying in the clearance corner of a bicycle shop called "Eben's Bikes". Red dreams of being the center of a circus act, which is represented within a dream sequence in which it is ridden by a circus clown named Lumpy. After cycling onstage to little fanfare, Lumpy begins a juggling act with three colored balls, which he continually drops by accident, prompting the unicycle to roll out from underneath him and catch them. Eventually, Lumpy accidentally launches one of the balls out of the ring, prompting Red to go out and retrieve it without his notice. After realizing that his unicycle is out from beneath his feet, Lumpy falls and vanishes from the dream, after which Red catches the other two balls and juggles them to an uproarious applause; however, the dream ends, and Red awakens after bowing to the audience, realizing that it is still in the bike shop. Depressed, it returns to the corner where it was previously resting and becomes inanimate again.

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