Presto

Pixar is the new Disney (as in the good Disney of old). They continue to make quality stories, push boundaries of visual design capabilities and, above all, charm audiences young and old. The same holds with Presto, the team's latest short cartoon which played before each screening of Wall-E. In it, a hungry rabbit, upset his magician owner will not give him the carrot promised to him, decides to sabotage the show in a variety of increasingly humorous ways until he gets it. What makes this simple premise shine is the clever slapstick gags, great characters and the overall sweet tone throughout the film. It's just pure and simple cartoon fun that sets the right tone for the film after it. The absence of dialogue actually makes the whole thing funnier, as their are no corny lines to ruin the enjoyment like in most non-Pixar cartoons. I highly recommend buying it on iTunes or seeing Wall-E just to make sure yo get to experience it.

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.

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...

To go with Pixar's most perfect movie, we're treated to a 5 minute short before the picture starts. Presto is beautifully animated, looking just as good as a full length animated picture would, and also, like the movie it was shown with, Wall-E, it has no dialogue, yet still comes off brilliantly. It induced more laughs than any other full length film I've seen this year.

Presto is a magician. He's late to work and forgets to feed his rabbit who he's about to use for a trick. Presto has a hat where anything that goes into the hat comes out of another hat. Rebelling against Presto, the rabbit refuses to be pulled from the hat and tries to make the magician look bad. Chaos ensues, as do many belly laughs, which have never been produced in me to this magnitude from a cartoon.

This was one of Pixar's best shorts. It was the perfect length with the perfect amount of jokes, mostly slapstick, which caused some real laughter from me, and the entire audience. The animation was vibrant and colorful, and the way it had a nice glow to it, similar to the way Ratatouille looks (I don't know how to explain it). Never has a crotch hit been more expertly thought out, and never have I laughed harder at an animation as I did with this little gem.

My rating: **** out of ****. 6 mins.

I have always loved Pixar, and Presto- shown before the enchanting WALL-E- is one of my favourites ever from them. Pixar films and shorts always have had amazing animation and Presto is no exception. The colours have so much vibrancy and warmth and the backgrounds are smooth and elegant. The music is suitably rousing and dynamic with what's going on screen. Presto has some great and very funny humour, not through dialogue, but through slapstick and visual gags. In fact, for me Presto is one of the funnier Pixar short films, the slapstick and visual gags are not just funny and there are plenty of them but also very clever. I also love how much heart there is in the simple story and how engaging the characters are, especially the rabbit. Presto has humour and heart, but what makes it so good is also its sweet tone without making it cloyingly sweet. Overall, a superb short film, it really is 5 minutes of sheer joy. 10/10 Bethany Cox