Blu-ray

It may have been little more than a belated cash-in on Pixar's aquatic smash Finding Nemo, but the 2010 Belgian animated feature A Turtle's Tale: Sammy's Adventures clearly did well enough to justify the bankrolling of this equally lacklustre sequel. This time around Sammy and Ray are snatched up by human poachers, along with a couple of new hatchlings, and deposited in a high end aquarium in Dubai. In other words, it's basically the Nemo portions of Finding Nemo, stretched out to feature-length and on a much grander scale. Yawn...

Thankfully, while the film itself is nothing to write home about, this Blu-ray release's MVC 1.78:1 1080p 3D presentation is nothing short of sensational. As is made clear in the accompanying interviews with director Ben Stassen, the company responsible for the film has been working on 3D animations for much longer than any of its Hollywood contemporaries - and its confidence and expertise in the stereoscopic format regularly shines through in the film's convincing use of negative paralax and the excellent staging of action scenes (such as Chapter 6's chase). If you're looking for a disc purely for demoing your system's 3D capabilities, then Sammy's Great Escape 3D is definitely one to consider.

The disc also provides you with the option to watch it 'flat', with an AVC presentation derived from the stereoscopic MVC encode. The same pleasingly dynamic DTS-HD MA 5.1 mix is employed on both versions. Extras takes the form of four surprisingly technical featurettes looking at the film's production.

Sammy's Great Escape 3D, Warner Home Video, All-region BD, £25 Approx
HCC VERDICT: 3/5