When it became clear that Presto was a comic villain, the filmmakers used the great antagonistic relationships between Bugs and Elmer or Yosemite Sam as a model for the main characters in the short.

"As far as animation style, that was tricky to find too. We did look a lot at Tex Avery, but mainly our source material was Tom and Jerry, because it's very clear that Presto is Tom and Alec is Jerry. And we looked at Warner Bros., of course, especially any performance-oriented cartoon, particularly the one where Bugs is fighting with the opera singer, called Long-Haired Hare [directed by Chuck Jones in 1949]. And there's a lushness to Tom and Jerry that's almost in Disney territory. Warner Bros. is a pretty good middle ground for fullness and crack timing. Tex is more joke-oriented and since this is basically like a stand-up piece -- we are telling visual pantomime jokes in animation -- we looked at Tex just to see how he controls motion to deliver jokes."

Sweetland thinks Presto was a refreshing change of pace from the more nuanced, emotionally complex and hyperreal Pixar features. Fortunately, a lot of the technology for the squash-and-stretch in 3D came with Brad Bird and The Incredibles. "The challenge was artistic," Sweetland suggests, "and the hardest thing was to de-program everything I had learned on the features...

"With the short, the main thing is, 'Where's the punch line?' And let's design movement for the punch line, because you don't want to water down the screen with a bunch of ancillary movement and nuance. It takes a high degree of control to stage things. It's one of those counterintuitive challenges where you think animating less will be easier, but doing anything with less means you have to think a little bit more."

Also integral is the look of Presto, supplied by Production Designer Harley Jessup (Ratatouille), which Sweetland admits is a cross between those two terrific turn-of-the-century magician movies, The Prestige and The Illusionist. "This is perfect because the classic cartoons sprung out of a vaudeville style. You have true magic with the hats and it's nice to think of it as overlapping with the modern age, but it's not overwhelmed by technology. Harley was great at making that world seem lush and decadent and alive. And that was important for the comedy. You had to have this environment of total formality.

"We kept looking at the London Opera House and the Paris Opera House and classic vaudeville theaters here in San Francisco, including the Geary, which we actually took a tour through. Presto has to try so hard to be a high-status person and impress the crowd, which is the aristocracy. Overstatement is a motif of the short, and Harley is the perfect person for that. The theater is one of my favorite things about the short."

To get an environment of high formality, the filmmakers looked at the London Opera House, the Paris Opera House and classic vaudeville theaters like the Geary in San Francisco for set design ideas.

However, populating this ornate theater with 2,500 patrons (even with the help of Massive software under the supervision of Matt Webb) was an expensive proposition. There was talk early on of just doing some cutaways to reveal a few audience members. But Sweetland thinks that seeing just the back of their heads makes it seem all the more real, and adds to Presto's humiliation.

"I couldn't be happier about getting a [full] crowd into that theater. We got the chance to create a world inside this theater, which is like a steroid-pumped vaudeville theater that can only exist in fantasy with such a ridiculous scale. But it has every bit of Pixar realism to lend the grandeur of it."

Jessup definitely dressed their world from the Ratatouille prop room, as they rummaged left and right and had sticky fingers.

"One bit of technical R&D: We were pushing the characters pretty fast and there were lots of scrambles and we noticed that the motion blur after animation was a little fuzzy and faint, so we had the time to go in and try different composites. We tried to get the characters a little more solidified.

"There's a tendency with standard motion blur to, say, have a character's foot during a scramble de-materialize just a bit. It looks a little too diffuse. We didn't do a uniform change in motion blur, just those instances where the animation is really pushing the characters to the limit: about a dozen shots or so. We were going for a combined dry brush or distortion drawing look, trying to emulate hand-drawn animation. I was glad that most of the animators really dug working on a cartoony cartoon. They found the slapstick pretty liberating."

Bill Desowitz is editor of VFXWorld.