Pixar’s Presto is a slapstick ode to Warner Bros. and Tom and Jerry toons. All images © Disney/Pixar.

Presto, the newest Pixar short, which premieres at Annecy on June 10 before screening theatrically with WALL•E on June 27, is a real cartoony departure. It's a slapstick ode to Warner Bros. and Tom and Jerry toons, in which a turn-of-the-century magician finds himself in a hilarious onstage feud with his hungry rabbit. Talk about a carrot and stick reversal. Presto, the magician, has never experienced such humiliation, as the crafty rabbit, Alec, gives him a taste of his own supernatural hocus pocus. There are plenty of magic hats and vaudevillian antics during the frantic five minutes, punctuated by iconic squash-and-stretch gyrations and bug-eyed reactions. Presto gets egg on his face, is attacked by a ladder, has his clothes torn off, gets electrocuted, uncontrollably dances a jig and is hurled high into the rafters. And the stuffy audience cheers every moment of it.

For first-time director Doug Sweetland, the animator who's worked on every Pixar feature up to Ratatouille, as well as the Boundin' short, Presto was a revelatory experience -- just as shorts should be.

Doug Sweetland.

"What I ended up pitching and what ended up on screen are two different things," he says. "The only consistent thing is that it's a magician and a rabbit. The idea of it being a throwback to old cartoons came along the way. I pitched the magician as a sympathetic character who gets dumped by his rabbit. And at an opportune moment, a fan boy rabbit comes knocking at the door asking for an autograph and he incorporates this knock-kneed newcomer into his act almost immediately. And all these hat gags sprung from that. I wanted both of these characters to be innocent... Once it got approved, that's when my troubles started and the real work began, when Presto becomes a really antagonistic character, who's more oblivious than mean-spirited up front."

Sweetland got deeply lost trying to find a working story. "There were months and months when I was pitching and bombing." But the Pixar brain trust of John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton, Pete Docter, Bob Peterson and Lee Unkrich proved invaluable.

"It's like when you sign up for the Army: you don't expect them to go easy on you. And it was very much a boot camp-like experience. But it was the opportunity of a lifetime to be taught by these guys. I would be a fool not to trust them, but I did everything to hold onto my ideas. And, ironically, the first time I went in to pitch something where I had no idea whether it would work or not, was the first time that they bought it. It ended up being a total laugh fest.

"My main misconception in the beginning was that story was about the best collection of ideas relating to a topic. But it's not: it's all about sequence. Andrew Stanton at one point sensed that I was holding onto old ideas. 'Well, just try it out, draw it -- it takes five minutes.' It was that 'stop holding on, stop holding on.' That was the advice that got me to go into places and see where it went, rather than trying to control the process.

"The other thing is that the hats are a device in the story. And for the longest time, I was fixated on the gags. The story just didn't work from a character standpoint and Bob Peterson said, 'I know this is going to sound weird, but the short should work without the hats at all.' His comment got me to focus purely on the two characters and charting a progression of their argument."

The Tom and Jerry influence stemmed from a genuine story need and was helpful in establishing a quick setup. In order to get to the conflict quickly, viewers had to know what the rabbit needed.

Thus, the Warner Bros. and Tom and Jerry influences stemmed from a genuine story need. "We needed a really quick setup, we needed to know what the rabbit needed right away, and we needed to know what the conflict was. And that was where we spent the majority of time, working out the first 30 seconds of the short. When it became clear that Presto was a comic villain, then it couldn't help but point back to these great antagonistic relationships between Bugs and Elmer or Yosemite Sam. And so that became a model for us. Serendipitously, we had Teddy Newton as our character designer, who is steeped in classic cartoon history and styles. He designed our characters for us and John [Lasseter] was very clear up front about having them be iconic: signifiers of the magician and the rabbit you would expect him to have.