After taking a week off due to the big fiesta film party that is South by Southwest, I’m back in action with my fingers all over the pulse of the world of Blu-ray. In this entry of This Week in Blu-ray, I’m not only bringing you the releases of this week, but I will be mixing in some choice picks from last week…

While Neil is hitting on indie rock chicks during the second half of the SXSW film festival, Kevin is left at home finding a guest host. So, he calls on Kelly Gingery from FlickChick.tv to help him out. They lament the problems with The Bounty Hunter and take wild guesses about Diary of a Wimpy Kid and Repo Men.

The Best Animated Feature category — as you know — celebrates the best of the year’s animated fare. It is also the Academy Awards’ youngest category, first taking root in 2001. It was created ten years after Disney’s Beauty and the Beast became the only animated film to ever be nominated for Best Picture. This year, almost 20 years after Beauty and the Beast and almost ten years after Shrek won the first Best Animated Feature award, we find ourselves once again with a first.

Well, James Cameron’s Avatar posted a $27 million opening day on Friday, and despite weekend winter storms that slowed its momentum a bit, it still made $73 million for the second highest December of all time. It is also Cameron’s best open of all time.

This week, on a very special episode of Reject Radio, we change the entire face of the internet film podcast world by doing the show in photo-realistic 3D.

While 2009 may have been a weak year for movies overall, animated films shined in a way they haven’t in a very long time.

This weekend was indeed a good one for the frogs, as The Princess and the Frog won the box office with a solid though not overwhelming haul of $25 million.

Kevin Carr sits his chubbiness down and sees if The Princess and the Frog, Invictus and The Lovely Bones can make the grade.

‘The Princess and the Frog’ doesn’t have the greatest of stories or the most interesting characters, but it’s a welcome return to a classical style of animation and a form of animated storytelling that Disney appeared to have written off.

Kevin and Neil find themselves in not-so-familiar territory by not totally fighting about this week’s movies. While Neil hasn’t seen The Princess and the Frog, he and Kevin pretty much agree about the other new releases like Invictus and The Lovely Bones.

This week moviegoers set the record for the biggest box office year ever at the movies — already past 9.63 billion — and this weekend is bound to see an increase in that total as two new movies go wide: Invictus and The Princess and the Frog.

Yesterday, Variety published the list of films that have made the cut of 20 for the race to get the Best Animated Feature Oscar. Allow me to break this down for you…

The folks at Walt Disney Animation can still draw. Just in case you weren’t aware of that, they have made a point of illuminated said fact in the opening moments of the trailer for their first hand-drawn film in 5 years, The Princess and the Frog.

This Christmas, Disney returns to its beloved 2D animation with The Princess and the Frog. A lot of buzz has been surrounding the main character’s ethnicity, because this Disney princess… is black.