Valiant surely seemed a good idea in the planning stage. A CGI feature about homing pigeons in WWII battling it out with evil German falcons? The basis is there for a nice little cartoon. Add voices like Ewan McGregor, Ricky Gervais, John Hurt, John Cleese and Hugh Lurie and it sounds like something worth seeing.
Wrong.
As the bland and flat Valiant played, I found myself thinking about the ways Pixar could have made this film better. That’s not idle thinking – Valiant comes from Vanguard Entertainment, but is distributed by Disney, and you can’t help but wonder if this wasn’t an investigation into what the Mouse House could do after Pixar left. But the film here makes the Dreamworks CG output look classic.
First of all, Pixar would never hinge a film on as bland a character as the titular Valiant. A stunted pigeon with a desire to serve his country in the Royal Homing Pigeon Service, taking important messages back and forth across enemy lines, Valiant has no more personality than “Small and spunky.” He’s almost a ghostly presence in his own film. Ewan McGregor pipes in every now and then to give Valiant one of his few lines, but the film belongs to Gervais as Valiant’s smelly sidekick Bugsy. If there’s any reason to see this film, it’s for Gervais, who is hilarious as always.
The other members of Valiant’s cadre of homing pigeons are just as empty – there are two dumb brute brothers and an upper class twit, and they’re led by a very heroic pigeon in aviator glasses. These are all types out of WWII films, which is cute, but it seems like the script isn’t interested in fleshing them out any more than their four word descriptions.
It doesn’t have much time, either. At 76 minutes, Valiant just rushes past. I see that there is an international cut running 109 minutes – that’s an awful lot of time that has been cut from the film, and you feel it. Coherence is just barely maintained, but there’s never a second to think about anything, there’s never a moment where a character gets to do anything that could make you care about them.
The comedy is boring – lots of birds falling down and hitting their heads and falling down and getting stuck in stuff and falling down. There is a fart joke or two, as well. But almost nothing is funny, even on the level that a six year old could appreciate. Again, Gervais offers some of the few laughs I found, but it was all in his great delivery and never in any of his lines.
The animation is spotty as well – some of the character work is nice, and some of the action is great, but every now and again things look cheap. There’s a scene where pigeons are getting a shower and the water looks like transparent rice.
Worst of all, though, is the way the film has no coherent world. In all the best Pixar films, you feel like these characters really live in their strange worlds. The toys and the fish and the monsters have worlds with rules and history and a lived in feeling. In Valiant, the world around the pigeons feels arbitrary. There’s not a lot of information given about the war or the enemy (don’t even bother looking for a swastika). The pigeons themselves seem to live in some generic nature cartoon – the pigeon bar has toadstools as literal stools – but who thinks of dirty urban pigeons in connection to toadstools? Why do they clip their feathers with aphids? Why are the French mice? None of it works, and none of it ever comes together to create a whole world that you can get lost in. The pigeons never feel like pigeons.
Valiant’s a movie that will probably divert the smaller children just because it is full of loud, moving pictures (be aware that there is some dark stuff, though, including a gruesome gallery of stuffed pigeons), but adults will be bored and irritated by this thin film.
5 out of 10