Not too long ago I released a short animated film called 'RED'. The film follows a toy robot and his journey to the tree of life. RED falls in love with this idea of the tree as he sits directly opposite a painting of it. He is captivated by this painting and seeks to find it.
You may ask, since he's moving around and has feelings for this tree... clearly he must have some life in him, so why? why search for the tree? Well, I can't really give you a straight forward answer to this unfortunately. What I can say is that the film is in many ways a fairy tale, a fairy tale within the mind of a toy robot. Whether RED went on this journey or not even I cannot say, I'd personally like to think he didn't and it was all set in his mind, in the mind of a lifeless object.
So why? I guess I didn't realise it until recently but in many ways RED is based on every bit of wanderlust I have in my self. I sit at my desk all day creating fictional realities because I feel somewhat limited within mine.
For those of you who have seen the film Blade Runner by Ridley Scott
"I have… seen things you people wouldn't believe… Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those… moments… will be lost in time, like [small cough] tears… in... rain. Time… to die…" The film was quite heavily inspired by this one line, this idea of being more human than human in a sense. Being able to look beyond from where you are. All those memories that will eventually get lost or never heard by anyone.
Whether the tree actually exists doesn't matter, RED is about our ability to escape from the world into something truly beautiful. We live routine lives and not often are we given this chance to "see things people wouldn't believe", we live robot lives almost everyday and we rely on escape, we rely on our minds a lot of the time. In many ways RED being a robot is a metaphor for routine, being trapped in a plastic body and not completely feeling human a lot of the time.
"don’t give yourselves to brutes - men who despise you - enslave you - who regiment your lives - tell you what to do - what to think and what to feel! Who drill you - diet you - treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men - machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men!" -Charlie Chaplin
The tree represents our ability to dream, our goal. The journey is all the beauty our minds allow us to envision, it represents the amazing moments we do have while travelling to our goals, those brief moments of happiness.
Essentially RED "dies" at the end of the film, he finds what he believes to be the tree of life. In all honesty I intentionally made the tree look incredibly different from the painting, my reasons being is that it was never the tree RED was searching for. Instead, it is the reality that we settle with until it's "time... to die...". Things will never be the way you imagine it in your head but sometimes the moments we settle for in our lives always feel like more.
If you haven't seen the film or just wanna rewatch it, here's the link;
https://vimeo.com/94875483
Stay Caffeinated Guys,
Adeel
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