It's 1944 and the British carrier pigeons are failing to return from their missions. New recruits are needed for the Royal Homing Pigeon Service and tiny Valiant is eager to join. Wing Commander Gutsy is the ace flyer who inspires Valiant to travel to London to join. On the way, he befriends Bugsy who is on the run from thugs.The animation is weak for its time. It looks more like a DVD movie. The surface work is bad. The story is unimpressive and boring. There is nothing surprising. The characters are unimaginative. This needs some real drama. They could have made the War more personal for Valiant. The story feels very old. The only good aspect is the talents of the voice actors but it is never going to overcome its deficiencies.

When I first saw trailers for this movie I thought it may be mildly interesting. The animation was sub-par with companies like Pixar, but this movie was advertised by Disney so I was interested.The biggest problem with this movie is that the overall concept is kind of stupid. I do not remember messenger pigeons ever being used in WWII (or to great extent). None of the jokes in this movie were really funny. The characters weren't too likable, and the movie seemed very short. I guess not much happens in the movie. The climax doesn't seem more climatic than the rest of the movie, which was pretty boring.Overall a pretty dull movie with almost no character development, and just an overall bad plot. Not to mention the animation is pretty awful.

The idea was brilliant, almost inspired, but it turned into very much of a lame duck (no pun intended) on screen. The Dickin award was and is a sort of animals VC or George Cross. In World War II (when this film is set), homing pigeons more or less cleaned up with 32 out of 54 awarded for displaying conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty whilst serving with British Commonwealth armed forces or civil emergency services (according to Wikipedia). Now back to the movie. The trouble is that it never really managed to run (or fly) very far with the original immaculate conception. I thought that it pretty much found its level by catering for eight year-olds (of all ages) by copious amounts of burping and farting from the birdie characters, which was more or less the high point of the action. The plot (if you can call it that) was thinner than the wafer on your interval ice-cream, with the eponymous Valiant (voiced by Ewan McGregor), wanting to be a hero in the Royal Air Force Homing Pigeon Service, which flew messages about enemy movements across the English Channel. Although it may represent a (forgotten) slice of wartime history, it fails miserably to impress at the comedic level, except unintentionally: "We have ways of making you squawk" is possibly one of the worst lines ever in movie history (and I've sat through a few, I can tell you). There are possible compensations though. Here, I'm thinking of the richest array of vocal talents never to have shown their faces on screen, probably making it one of the most expensive British voiced-over films ever. You name them and there they are. Everyone from John Cleese and Hugh Laurie to John Hurt and Rik Mayall. But then these voices are so distinctive, the problem I had was in attempting to dissociate the cartoon from his real life comedy persona. Moreover, this wasn't helped by the writers apparently trying to recreate their sitcom characters by cunning use of dialogue(certainly with the Ricky Gervais character, who sounded more like David Brent out of "The Office" than David Brent out of "The Office"). In fact, it was so predictable at times, they may just as well have got Rory Bremner to do all the voices. (Perhaps they did - that would account for Hugh Laurie coming across more like his Blackadder character than Hugh Laurie doing his Blackadder character.)So my advice to you is not to inflict this film on yourself unless you're with (or you are) an eight year-old (of any age) desperate to spend an hour and a half out of the rain. Of course, I could be wrong and possibly this film made a lot of money at the box office. In which case I can only think that the movie-going public were shat on by the film makers from a great height. Final verdict: Bird's Custard.

In the IIWW, the British Service of Pedgeons is going to broke out. They are forced to send to combat little and inexperienced pidgeons to do the job. In these missions there is Valiant, a very young and courageous one, which, maybe, can change history. The story is the typical for kids: the good ones, the bad ones (but not very bad), some adventures and a happy ending. Though the images are quite good (CG image), the movie has no astonishing moments that one could expect when computers do the job. Anyway, this is a movie for kids, and, well, they probably would be unaware of that. The characters are easy to understand and typical, the story is not complicated and it has some funny moments. It is relaxed to watch, but an adult would probably be bored easily, as the jokes are very childish. This is not Ice Age or Shrek, but parents will not be very fed up (just a little), while kids will have a good time.