Valiant (2005)

Valiant, a 2005 British computer-animated feature about homing pigeons in the Second World War, arrives on the examination table with the quiet confidence of a film that has no argument to make and no constituency to flatter. It concerns a small wood pigeon who joins the Royal Homing Pigeon Service, befriends a shifty colleague, endures basic training, and ultimately delivers a message that alters the Normandy invasion. Ewan McGregor supplies the plucky lead. Ricky Gervais supplies a pigeon who cheats at shell games. Tim Curry supplies a German falcon with an eyepatch and a vegetarian diet, a detail meant to evoke a certain historical figure without naming him. The enterprise lasts seventy-six minutes and was assembled on a modest budget in west London, which critics at the time called guerrilla filmmaking and, less charitably, amateurish. The feathers, by all accounts, were a misery to render.

As a document of social consciousness, the film is a barren field. Its voice cast is a parade of British comedic institution, uniformly pale and predominantly male, with Olivia Williams permitted a nurse and Sharon Horgan a resistance mouse. No romantic arrangement beyond the conventional is contemplated. No character interrogates the class structure of the Royal Air Force, though the pigeons would have grounds. The environmental question is never raised, which is notable in a film entirely about birds. The villain is a falcon who serves the Germans because falcons eat pigeons. The film declines to develop a deeper theory of avian political economy.

The tonal register is that of a mild patriotic bedtime story. It ends with a medal, a kiss, and a title card thanking the animals that saved thousands of lives, a sentiment no reasonable viewer will contest. There is a war in it, and a villain, and a moral about courage in small packages, but nothing that could be mistaken for a sermon. It lectures no one. It challenges no institution. It flaps along, competently enough, and lands.

Returned for the record with no further findings to enter against it, the picture stands as a relic of an earlier, less instructive era of children's entertainment, when a talking animal could simply go to war and come home to a kiss without anyone demanding it account for itself. It is, in the end, a film about a pigeon who wanted to be a hero, and became one, and that is the entire transaction. We log it and move on. The categories remain empty, and the examination concludes without incident.

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