This movie is about homing pigeons struggling to deliver a message during WWII. They succeed, unlike the movie they’re in, which fails to deliver entertainment in any way and is mostly boring and pathetic.

The star is a young pigeon called Valiant, who dreams of joining the Royal Homing Pigeon Service and battling the German falcons over the English Channel. He enlists, is sent over to France with a crack team of other pigeons, and must retrieve a vital message regarding the position of German troops.

OK, not a bad premise, but you know what kills it? The characters. The characters in Valiant are either unmemorable nobodies (Valiant, Toughwood, Tailfeather, and Lofty) or actively annoying douchebags (everyone else, basically) whom you learn to hate after a few scenes.

The story is kinda flat and predictable, since everyone is a walking cliche and all of the movies scenes have been rehearsed, as it were, it thousands of other movies. And did I mention it has really, really bad jokes? Like, they make contact with the French resistance (who are mice), and are introduced to Charles de Girl, yeah, like Charles de Gaulle, except she’s a girl. I laughed, but not at what I was supposed to laugh at. There’s also a mouse character with a large number of matches strapped to his body. A running gag has him whirling around with lit matches yelling “SABOTAAAAGE!” for some inexplicable reason. I guess the screenwriters were hoping it would become an internet meme.

This movie is just terrible. The story sucks, the characters are annoying as hell, the movie manages to be completely implausible (in the final showdown, it takes them all of five minutes to fly from France to England, or that’s how it looks, anyway) and lastly, the animation left me cold. A movie about birds benefits from looking realistic, but all the characters in Valiant have a plastic, cartoony look that reminds me of Chicken Run, especially in the sense that there’s no feather definition and everyone looks like they’re sculped from Play-Doh.

Once, you could have certain expectations regarding a CGI movie. They cost so much to make that only sure-fire winners made it to theaters. But as the technology became cheaper, more and more crap started piling on. Don’t watch or rent Valiant. Forget it even exists.