Presto

Hi, my name is Doug Sweetland, and I'm the director of Presto.

I'd like to take this opportunity to just point out

all the brilliant contributions of everyone who worked on this short,

but, unfortunately, that would take the length of a feature,

so I salute you, Presto crew. Presto crew forever.

And, instead, we'll just discuss some of the underlying ideas

that are at the heart of Presto,

things that we were thinking about while we were making this short.

Starting out, it's clearly sort of a classic cartoon throwback,

but with some key differences that I think make it intrinsically Pixar.

First, the short takes place in real time,

which means that we can't really cross dissolve from a gag to another,

or from one set piece to another,

as is often the case in old classic cartoons.

Ours has to run in real time much more

like its own sort of sequence in a feature or something.

Which makes it, then, a self-contained story in five minutes,

and not a serial.

Lastly, it's entirely pantomimed,

meaning that even though they have voices,

we can't use jazzy dialogue to kind of push things along.

One idea we wanted to convey early on is just that

Presto is... Well, he's clearly a cad.

And that even though he has these powerful magical hats,

he doesn't really have any magical powers himself.

And so, in a way, this whole act

is sort of his exploitation of these hats and this rabbit,

rather than by his own merit.

In fact, a friend had pointed out how limited his imagination is.

He has what might be the most powerful device in the world,

this sort of teleportation device,

and he only uses it to stage sort of a mediocre magic act.

Another important concept from a character standpoint

was just making Alec as sympathetic as possible.

So here we are in sort of the gag onstage/offstage section of the short,

and just notice that Alec's brows are incredibly sad.

He's doing some sadistic things to Presto,

but we just felt for the humanity of the short

that he's not, himself, a sadist, he's actually incredibly apologetic

and wishes that it didn't have to come to this,

but it just simply must come to this.

Really, that was, like, a tweak that came sort of late in the process

and it came just right down to changing his brows.

For the longest time, they were sort of like angry brows.

And just lightening them up and making him look sorry,

I think, adds to the sympathy and, hopefully, to the humor of that stretch.

Another thing is just notice that he doesn't really ever move

from that spot on the table and that's another important thing.

You think classic cartoons, everything's got to be completely zany.

But a lot of, hopefully, the humor

and certainly the strength of Alec as a character

stems from the fact that he's able to do all of these things

without actually even really barely moving at all,

certainly not his... If you're looking at his feet.