A Bugs Life

Studio: Disney Home Entertainment

Country of Origin: United States

Purchase: DVD Pacific

Region: A, B, C

I imagine choosing your favourite Pixar film is akin to choosing your favourite child, but I have always held a soft spot for A Bugs Life. Whilst Pixar have learnt a lot about storytelling since and the film is not without flaws, there's a lot to love in the film, including some fantastic CG animation that hasn't aged despite being 11 years old. The Blu-ray is technically brilliant, with a direct digital transfer, with nary a blemish or fault to be found. Likewise, the DTS HD Master Audio track is spot on and makes for a great demo.

Porting over almost all of the DVD features and adding a few more, this film deserves to be in all Blu-ray fans collections. New to the Blu-ray release is a retrospective round table discussion which reunites the major players in the production, in addition to a storyboarded alternate version of the film.

For a family friendly film which also entertains the older folk, you can't really go past Pixar and A Bug's Life is no exception.

Monsters Inc.

Studio: Disney Home Entertainment

Country of Origin: United Kingdom

Purchase: Amazon.co.uk

Region: A, B, C

Monsters Inc. marks the fifth Pixar film to be released on Blu-ray, despite only three having been released in Australia. Upon release in 2001, the film was a runaway success and heralded massive advances in CG animation, including previously impossible fur and clothing simulations. However, all the tech would be nothing without a heart warming story and this is something the film has in spades. The films ending is perfect and tugs my heart strings every time. The Blu-ray again features a direct digital transfer which is the very definition (no pun intended) of perfection.

Disney have again provided the vast majority of extra features from the previous DVD (so you can safely eBay that - I just did) and again include a directors retrospective roundtable, which for the first time in a Disney animated film, features the utterance of a naughty word that starts with the letter 's'. It's probably worth it for that alone.

So, that's a look at some of my recent recommendations. I've got some big orders on the way, so we will be sure to do this again in the coming weeks! Until then...