Index: Misc/NEWS
===================================================================
--- Misc/NEWS	(revision 43417)
+++ Misc/NEWS	(working copy)
@@ -25,6 +25,8 @@
 Extension Modules
 -----------------
 
+- Fix bug #1454485, crash when passing short strings to unicode arrays.
+
 - Ubuntu bug #29289: Fixed a bug that the gb18030 codec raises
   RuntimeError on encoding surrogate pair area on UCS4 build.
 
Index: Lib/test/test_array.py
===================================================================
--- Lib/test/test_array.py	(revision 43417)
+++ Lib/test/test_array.py	(working copy)
@@ -732,6 +732,14 @@
 
             self.assertRaises(TypeError, a.fromunicode)
 
+        def test_unicode_buffers(self):
+            whole = "bar\304\261\305\237"
+            for i in range(len(whole), 0, -1):
+                part = whole[:i]
+                a = array.array('u')
+                a.append(part)
+                print a.tounicode()
+
     tests.append(UnicodeTest)
 
 class NumberTest(BaseTest):
Index: Objects/unicodeobject.c
===================================================================
--- Objects/unicodeobject.c	(revision 43417)
+++ Objects/unicodeobject.c	(working copy)
@@ -319,7 +319,7 @@
 
 	/* Single character Unicode objects in the Latin-1 range are
 	   shared when using this constructor */
-	if (size == 1 && *u < 256) {
+	if (size == 1 && (unsigned) *u < 256) {
 	    unicode = unicode_latin1[*u];
 	    if (!unicode) {
 		unicode = _PyUnicode_New(1);