Starring (the voices of): Ewan
McGregor, Ricky Gervais, Jim Broadbent, John Cleese
Released: 25th March 2005
Cert: U
It’s WWII and Valiant (McGregor)
is a little woodpigeon with dreams of doing his ‘bit’ in the war effort.
So he does.
On the way he teams up with a group of misfits, out-heroes the real hero
and defies their mortal enemy.
The end.
No, I wasn’t bothered about this
one.
The animation was pretty good and there is a reasonable story (given that
it is a kids’ film) but my overall problem was the apparent lack of any actual
jokes.
The main sources of humour come from Gervais’s trademark rambling, ‘Allo ‘Allo style European accents and a
constant barrage of pigeon’s bashing into things and each other. That’s it.
Since Toy Story, the
children’s film market has become so much more clever and subversive with it’s
comedy since the filmmakers realised that they also have an adult market to try
to entertain at the same time. After all, if the parents enjoy the film then
they are more likely to bring their kids back again so they all started placing
‘grown up’ references that maybe the children wouldn’t understand but wouldn’t
distract them and yet allow the adults to be interested.
Valiant just doesn’t seem to
have bothered to make any effort at all so the humour never goes beyond knowing
that the kids will laugh at things falling over. Maybe they thought that
throwing Gervais in the mix would be enough but without a presence of any kind
of tangible material his pigeon is left mumbling like the drunk nutter in your
high street.
So Gervais fans might find it amusing to see their hero appear in
feathered form and the kids might enjoy it but you can’t trust their judgement
because they like things like McFly.
I prefer my cartoons to have a bit more substance.
