Red’s Dream (1987)

Directed by: John Lasseter | 4 minutes | animation, short film

In ‘Red’s Dream’ several projects of the makers came together. For example, one person was animation rain, another was working on bicycles, and another had the idea for a story about a juggling clown on a single wheel whose wheel was actually the hero of the show. All this was effectively combined in an atmospheric film about a pathetic unicycle that is discounted in the bicycle shop, but dreams of a career in the circus. Not everything is technically successful, but the content of the story and especially the emotion that is communicated with very simple means by the unicycle, make ‘Red’s Dream’ a successful short film by the then still fledgling Pixar animation studio.

The atmosphere is exceptional for a Pixar film, as this is a melancholic, melancholy story. This is why one of the makers jokingly sees this film as an example of the studio’s “blue period”. A year earlier, Pixar showed how it could breathe life into something as simple as a twilight lamp in the charming ‘Luxo Jr.’, but in the case of ‘Red’s Dream’ it goes a bit further. Without any additions to this object, the story and animation of the unicycle will make you, as a viewer, actually care about this object.

When the film starts, the bicycle is a bit dazed in the store, while it is raining outside, but then his dream begins in which he is the star of a clown act in the circus. The bicycle turns out to be able to juggle itself and no longer needs the clown who was sitting on his saddle a little earlier. Later, however, Red the unicycle returns to the brutal reality: the offers section of the bike shop. It makes him depressed and rolls slowly, his saddle – or head – bent forward to a desolate corner, where only a broom stands in a bucket of water. Slowly he lets himself fall against the wall.

The film is atmospheric and makes good use of shadows. The clown in Red’s dream is Pixar’s first attempt at making an organic figure, and looks just as ugly and unnatural as the baby Pixar would produce next in the short film ‘Tin Toy’, but also works here this flawed animation doesn’t detract much from the film, because clowns always have something unnatural about them, and there’s no need to build a bond with this character. The ‘Red’ wheel is the tragic hero of the story, and is again a huge success in creating spectator engagement.