Presto

A magician, his magic top hat and his desperately cute and hungry rabbit.

PRESTO is a Pixar featurette before WALL-E and has brought back the classically hilarious "short," popularized by Warner Bros. and Bugs Bunny cartoons all those decades ago.

The protagonist, being a rabbit, made me feel somehow like a person from the 40s or 50s might have felt when that other cheeky rabbit careened across the silver screen for the first time, with that sense of amazement and wonder at watching something so guttingly funny.

Presto the Magician is onstage for his act, but his rabbit wants to be fed, so refuses to be pulled from Presto's magic hat until he gets his fix of carrot. The myriad ways in which he confounds Presto's attempts to drag him from the hat are – once again, when speaking of Pixar – absolutely ingenious.

As any fan of Pixar's animated films know, when they send a new feature out, they include a short cartoon with it. PRESTO is the film that accompanies WALL-E and it is a silent picture.

A good part of the publicity surrounding WALL-E is that it is largely a silent film. But PRESTO is wholly one, concerning a stage magician, his carrot-hungry rabbit and a piece of real magic: a top-hot that is connected to a dunce cap. The magician can put his hand into the top hat and draw out things from the dunce cap. And, as is traditional, he intends to pull out the rabbit, but the rabbit, who resembles the rabbit in the TRIX cereal commercials, is upset that he is not getting any carrot, and sabotages the act in various amusing ways using the logic of the set-up.

A very amusing cartoon, and Pixar is to be commended for continuing to develop animation talent in its short subjects.

Unusually for a Pixar short, Presto is a rather fast and frenetic cartoon.

A magician is preparing for his stage show and has a nice juicy carrot for his rabbit.

The rabbit is salivating but the magician is just teasing him with it. The hungry rabbit causes chaos with the show especially with the magic hats.

Inadvertently with all the bedlam and the magician getting injured with the tricks going wrong, the show wows the audience.

Pixar shorts have long established themselves as not only gorgeous eye candy and funny but also clever and intelligent. I have always found it incredible how short films (whether they are animated or not) seek to tell a story in a short space of time. The very best do so in such a way that you have become connected with what you watch. In this sense I find short films to be much more remarkable than full length features as the most poignant of them have to overcome the limited time slot allocated to them. And Presto does just that. How can a magician and a little rabbit cause so much hilarity and mayhem in just a few minutes while also making you actually care for both characters? It is beyond me but that's what Pixar delivers. Presto lends homage to many of the classic Looney Tunes cartoons and is a roller coaster ride of enjoyment for both young and old. Following on from the equally magnificent "Lifted", "Bounding" and "One Man Band", Pixar has cemented themselves as not only the masters of creative story telling on the feature-length screen but also the short-length one. Combine that with the ever amazing (and now taken for granted) techniques used in their animation and you have an animated package that you will want to watch over and over again. Bugs would be so proud...

For the theatrical release of 'WALL•E (2008),' Pixar Studios continues that lovely time-honoured tradition of preceding the main feature with an amusing animated short. Not only that, but they've developed one of their best, second only to the mini-masterpiece that is 'Geri's Game (1997).' A hilarious throw-back to the classic Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons – such that we can almost envision Bugs in a starring role – 'Presto (2008)' concerns itself with the art of magic. When an uptight stage magician, Presto DiGiotagione, neglects to feed his hungry rabbit, Alec Azam, the malnourished pet mischievously decides to exact revenge on his owner, with the help of two magic hats and no shortage of dangerous backstage implements. Each time Presto attempts to pull the rabbit from his top hat, his hand emerges clutching all sorts of painful contraptions, from mouse traps to live electrical wires to an entire ladder. His performance already in tatters, the red-faced magician tries even harder to convince the rabbit to cooperate, his every action only making matters worse.

'Presto' was directed by Doug Sweetland, a long-serving animator at Pixar, in his directorial debut. Entirely wordless, as most of Pixar's shorts are, the film relies on terrific visuals and sound effects to provide the humour, though this effort is notably less reliant on sound effects than the previous 'Lifted (2006)' {which, appropriately, was directed by sound effects whiz Gary Rydstrom}. Working with a simple scenario, 'Presto' begins with relatively minor sight gags, gradually upping the ante until all hell breaks loose on-stage, and the hapless magician finds himself strung high above the ground. Obviously, the audience finds all this utterly magnificent, and Presto – however battered and bruised – is only too happy to accept this gracious applause. Some may find all this to be rather mean-spirited, but certainly no more so than Bugs Bunny when he got Elmer Fudd in his sights, and children will definitely find the rabbit's hilarious antics to be uproariously entertaining. This is a delicious cinematic appetiser from the best in the business.