Presto (2008)

Presto arrives from Pixar in 2008, a dialogue-free six-minute exercise in vaudeville slapstick directed by Doug Sweetland in his directorial debut. A magician named Presto DiGiotagione keeps a hungry rabbit, Alec Azam, locked in a cage and tethered to the act by a pair of magically linked hats. The rabbit wants his carrot. The magician wants applause. The result is a cascade of mousetraps, eggs, electrical sockets, and one unfortunate ladder, staged with the precision of a Tex Avery short and the timing of a Marx Brothers routine. It played in theaters before WALL-E, a placement that tells us all we need to know about its ambitions.

The cultural inventory here is remarkably spare. There is no casting gesture, no identity subtext, no gender commentary, no environmental lament, and no class critique to be excavated from the hat. Alec is a rabbit with a grievance about lunch. Presto is a showman with a bruised ego and a crotch injury. The film's entire political economy amounts to a root vegetable withheld and then restored. Scour the opera house for a message and you will find only a mousetrap and a piano falling from the fly space.

This is not a failing. It is a classification. The short belongs to a tradition that predates the current appetite for instruction, when cartoons were permitted to be cruel, fast, and silent. Its influences are catalogued plainly: Looney Tunes, Tom and Jerry, Chaplin, the Marx Brothers. It was nominated for an Academy Award and an Annie, lost both, and now sits in the Pixar vault as a pleasant appetizer. The rabbit gets second billing on the poster. That is the moral of the story, and the only one on offer.