Review of Valiant (2005) by Jesse O — 26 Jun 2012

Not a particularly mind-blowing film. Honestly I was expecting a lot worse than I got, but the story is so and so. I think that at its core there's a great underdog story here but the writing isn't exactly top-notch so it's a complete letdown.

Not to mention the animation isn't great. Then again how much CAN you do when your budget is $35 million compared to the $100+ million that a Dreamworks or Pixar movies get for its budget. So I don't think it's really fair to compare, even if they're in the same genre.

It's got a different enough setting that it doesn't feel like every CGi movie out there and the voice acting is pretty solid, even if the dialogue is not particularly impressive and is pretty much a cliched 'it's not the size of the dog it's the size of his heart' type of thing It is incredibly dull is probably the best term for the movie.

There's nothing that's really offensively bad about the movie, I mean unless you think that using World War 2 as a backdrop for a kids' movie is offensive., but there's nothing particularly good about it either.

It's definitely the most skippable CGi movie I've ever seen. The best thing about it, however, is not even the movie itself. It paints a nice picture that not only humans contributed to the WW2 efforts.

It said that animals help saved thousands of lives during the war and that animals were honored for their work in war with a medal called, and this is legit here, the Dickin medal. 54 of these were given away, 32 of them to pigeons, 18 for dogs, 3 for horses, and 1 for a cat.

That's definitely the coolest thing about the movie as I didn't even have any idea this was done. So at least I learned something I didn't know before with this movie.