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Valiant Our rating: Your rating: 1 2 3 4 Your Comments: see all MPAA rating: G Genre: Animated Theater release: August 19, 2005 by Walt Disney Pictures Directed by: Gary Chapman Runtime: 1 hour 16 minutes Cast: Ewan McGregor (Valiant), Ricky Gervais (Bugsy), Tim Curry (General Von Talon), Jim Broadbent (Sergeant), Hugh Laurie (Wing Commander Gutsy), John Cleese (Mercury), John Hurt (Felix), Olivia Williams (Victoria) Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

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The British do love their animals—so much so that, during World War II, they created a special award for birds and mammals that had served their country with valor. This award, called the Dickin Medal, was given to over 50 creatures during the war and its aftermath, and more than half of the recipients were pigeons. Yes, pigeons. In this age of encrypted e-mail attachments, it may be difficult to believe that the fate of nations once hinged (and so recently, at that) on birds carrying tiny bits of paper across the English Channel. But it did, and this nugget of historical fact gives Valiant—an animated film about a handful of birds who join the Royal Homing Pigeon Service, or RHPS—an extra nostalgic cachet.

The hero of this film is Valiant (voice of Ewan McGregor), a small wood pigeon who dreams of flying risky missions and proving his mettle alongside the bigger, brawnier likes of his idol, the stiff-upper-beak Wing Commander Gutsy (Stuart Little's Hugh Laurie). Valiant heads for London, where he meets Bugsy (The Office's Ricky Gervais), a smelly, grubby con artist who is so attached to the flies that swarm about his head that he's given them names. When Valiant goes to enlist in the RHPS, Bugsy tags along, but only because he has to dodge a couple of birds he has just tricked out of their seeds—and before Bugsy can talk his way out of his new assignment, he and Valiant are both sent off to boot camp.

What follows is an affectionate send-up of war-movie tropes, many of them given a cute or clever small-animal twist. Instead of running through a maze of tires, the birds must fly through tires swinging from a branch. When the pigeons lift weights, their barbells are made of apples and other fruit. When Valiant brings Victoria (Olivia Williams)—a dove, like all the other pretty nurses—a bouquet consisting of one single but rather large dandelion, she thanks him enthusiastically, but not for the reason we might think she's thanking him. And the ability of pigeons to regurgitate the items they swallow becomes a key plot point.

The pigeons' training is never really completed. The camp's drill sergeant (Jim Broadbent) is still working on this hapless bunch when Gutsy arrives and says he needs to send the new recruits on an urgent mission into occupied territory. And so, after the sergeant sends them off with a rousing pep talk that's a little heavy on the possible costs of battle ("Tomorrow, our innards may be spread like jam on toast …"), the pigeons are flown into France, where they must meet up with the Resistance, retrieve a message, and take it back to base.

And while they do all this, the pigeons must also watch out for evil German falcons. Unlike a number of recent cartoons, like Finding Nemo, in which the line between good carnivorous activity and bad carnivorous activity has become increasingly blurred and arbitrary, Valiant comes from a more old-fashioned school of thought. Here, the falcons who prey on the talking birds are the bad guys, plain and simple; meanwhile, it's okay for our heroes to eat worms, because worms are just speechless animals, and not persons like you and me.

The falcons, alas, are one of this film's weaker elements. As a general rule of thumb, even comedies work better when we can believe that the villains are truly menacing. But when the villains are portrayed as mere buffoons, it becomes difficult to take the story seriously; we begin to suspect that nothing is really at stake, and thus, instead of entering into the world of the story, we stand outside the story and watch it from a distance.

And so it is with General Von Talon, the falcon leader whose really bad fake-German accent is provided by The Rocky Horror Picture Show's Tim Curry. Sure, it's fun when Von Talon tells a captured pigeon named Mercury (John Cleese), "Vee haf vays of making you squawk!" But his preferred method of torture—exposing Mercury to yodeling records—is about as threatening as the "comfy chair" the cardinals used in Monty Python's old "Spanish Inquisition" sketches. And as Von Talon fusses over the colors of his leather capes, it becomes impossible to accept him as anything other than a harmless exercise in camp.

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