Valiant
Short description
Valiant is an animated adventure set during the Second World War, when the British military relied on homing pigeons to carry messages across occupied Europe. A young woodland pigeon named Valiant travels to London to join the Royal Homing Pigeon Service, determined to serve despite his small size. On the way he falls in with Bugsy, a scruffy con artist looking to avoid the clients he cheated, and the pair enter a training programme alongside other unlikely recruits. The unit is soon sent on a mission involving the French Resistance and enemy falcons led by the menacing Von Talon.
The film was directed by Gary Chapman and written by Kevin Bernhardt, Jordan Katz and George Webster, with John H. Williams producing. Ewan McGregor voices Valiant, Ricky Gervais voices Bugsy, and Tim Curry voices Von Talon; Jim Broadbent, Hugh Laurie and John Cleese round out the cast. It runs 76 minutes and was made for a budget of 35 million dollars, returning about 62 million dollars worldwide.
On IMDb it holds 5.5 from roughly 26,000 votes, and on TMDB 5.7 from about a thousand votes, while the critics' rating stands at 5.1 from 113 reviews. Those figures place the audience response slightly ahead of the critical one, with both settling around the middle of the scale.
What's left behind the scenes
- Members of the French Resistance are shown playing “Non, je ne regrette rien” by Édith Piaf (1915-1963), although the song was written 12 years after the end of World War II.
- Despite the film's brevity, it took over two years to complete the voice recording.
- Valiant addresses the instructor as 'sir,' although the correct form of address for officers in the military was by rank.
- On the German falcons, you can see helmets from World War I, not World War II.
- Over 200 artists from 41 countries worked on the film.
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