Pretty Good

Don't listen to the Hype. It's awful

Not sure how, but this is easily one of the best movies all summer. Multiple levels of funny, never takes itself seriously, super colorful, and creative.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

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.

This short animated film tells the story of a magician and his rabbit. They have to perform a magic trick on stage, but the rabbit is not cooperating in the show because the magician has not fed him."Presto" is short but it is really funny! The rabbit is just really funny. His facial expressions are very rich. The magician's endless tricks are entertaining. Their feud on stage is super hilarious. I love this animation.

I am a bit surprised that this is one of the highest and most frequently rated Pixar shorts on here, not only because it doesn't have a reference to one of their feature films, but also because I thought there wasn't really that much to it. Sure, the animation is nicely done as always, especially the rabbit, and here and there, there's even some wit to the duel between him and the magician, but all in all it was a rather disappointing 5 minutes sometimes even mounting in pointless over-the-top hubbub, especially towards the end. Still, I'm curious if Doug Sweetland, who did everything here, directing, writing and voicing, will ever get to direct his own feature. He hasn't worked for Pixar in the 5 years since this short, so it may not look too likely.In any case, I don't think this film was quality-wise on par with the Japanese more melancholic entry, to which it lost the Oscar. "Presto" is, in contrast to lots of other Pixar work, only one for younger audiences.

Included on the WALL-E (2008) DVD is another Oscar contender, albeit in the Animated Short category. Actually, it proved surprisingly even more satisfying than the occasionally maudlin main feature: 5 near-perfect minutes of non-stop hilarity involving an egocentric magician and his come-uppance during a stage performance by the proverbial rabbit-in-the-hat (when it is denied food). Highly inventive – especially funny is the struggle with the ladder, which recoils into the conjuror's groin – and (necessarily) fast-paced, it does that rare thing nowadays by genuinely evoking memories of the classic Looney Tunes cartoons from Warner Bros. While I have not watched the eventual Oscar winner in its category, I would say that PRESTO was equally deserving of the coveted statuette as WALL-E itself.