A Bug's Life

Pixar continues to amaze me with their computer animation and realistic renderings of all sorts of creatures and characters. A Bug's Life is their latest offering after their tremendously successful Toy Story.

The plot goes, a colony of ants are collecting food for the winter but as they are under the control of the ruthless grasshoppers, they also have to harvest food for these guys too. When Flik and his wacky inventions ends up sending the collected food into the local pond, the grasshoppers are not too impressed and so they give the ants until the the last leaf falls of the local tree to come up with twice as much food as initially requested. It's up to Flik to go and get some heroes and rescue his colony. A simple plot, but a very ingenious interpretation of it from an insects point of view.

Now onto the disc itself.

It was touted as the first dvd to be created direct from the computer, by-passing the telecine process used for all other film-to-dvd trasnfers so far. The region 1 version of a Bug's Life was a big success and the video quality was rated as the best that has appeared on dvd. Until now.

This disc is exceptional, simply stunning. Not only are we blessed with the greater resolution and colorspace of the PAL format but we are also lucky to have an anamorphic trasnfer of the disc before our region 1 cousins get their extra pricey "special edition" version later this year.

It's hard to describe it. The quality of this disc is simply amazing. I had a chance to have a decent look at in on a Sony Wega 80cm display (boy are those screens gorgeous) and words fail to describe the detail.

When doing an A-B comparison with the region 1 disc there's only a slight visible advantage to the region 4 corner so I did the next best thing and loaded them up into my dvd-rom and check out the raw images coming out. A much bigger difference here in that the region 4 version was oh so much sharper, more colorful and an obvious resolution improvement as seen in the comparison image below.

A raw comparison, no level adjustments, only a resize to fit onto this page. BIG difference

Right away I could see that the region 1 version wasn't compressed as well as ours. But that's not to say they both don't look good but I'm certainly going for the region 4 disc for this one.

Bit for bit, the soundtrack is identical to the region 1 version.

There is enough dynamic range in the soundtrack to entertain everyones frequency range preference. I'm a bass man myself and this soundtrack rocks. I can only imagine what a subwoofer would do to your room. Greg?

I couldn't fault the soundtrack at all so no quarms there.

Well, we get the same features as the region 1 disc, but presented a little better.

• Out-takes
  On the region 1 disc, the outtakes were presented as they were seen in the credits yet on OUR disc we get a credits free version just showing the outtakes themselves. The bonus being that the anamorphic side of the disc gets an anamorphic version of the outtake.
• Geri's Games
  Same academy award winning animation of an old man playing chess against his evil twin. Our version gets an anamorphic presentation. :)
• Disc presentation
  Due to the space required by the PAL anamorphic transfer, this disc was created as a dual sided disc. One side is the FULL FRAME version, the other contains the excellent ANAMORPHIC transfer.

Overall, the same extras but a much better presentation. Oh, I almost forgot, we don't get the annoying FBI warnings before the flick starts, just a simply disney intro and then straight into the movie.

This disc is what the region 1 version should have been. In a way, I'm glad region 1 is a sort of guinea pig to determine what people really want on their disney discs - anamorphic transfers.

Keep this up disney and region 4 people will be kept happy. Now onto the issue of more extras...