Red's Dream is a 1987 American animated<!--Do NOT change "animated" to "computer-animated"; method of animation isn't defining, it is what animated is.--> 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, California on July 10, 1987, and received general enthusiasm from its attendants. The idea of a bicycle shop for a setting was inspired by Ostby, a cycling enthusiast and graphics programmer at Pixar, who had been working on generating a complex still image of a bike shop. When developing the story for the film, Lasseter said that he wanted to create something with more "pathos" behind it, jokingly referring the film's development as Pixar's "blue period" due to the emotional drive behind the short.
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. The dream sequence, on the other hand, was to demonstrate the rendering capabilities of the Pixar Image Computer. An engineer named Tony Apodaca had converted Pixar's rendering software to run on the PIC, but it turned out that the machine's design left its processors without enough memory to use a program as complex as Chapreyes, and thus Apodaca was able to convert only a portion of its features for use with the computers. On account of these limitations, the dream sequence ended up looking cruder than the rest of the film, and Red's Dream was the only Pixar film to be made using the PIC.
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. After watching the film, he shook Lasseter's hand and stated meaningfully to him, "John, you did it."