The highbrow history of our literary, artistic, and cinematic avantgardes tends to obscure the fact that today’s equivalent is led by children. What is “postmodernism” if not a childish kicking over – or “deconstruction” – of the carefully constructed artistic and cinematic edifices of the past?

No critic or literary theorist has more successfully deconstructed the heroic myths of the past than the Disney team with their movie versions of them. But from Hercules to Aladdin to Pocahontas, Disney managed to pick myths that are a long way in the past and mostly unfamiliar to today’s children. For brighter children and adults cajoled into taking their kids to these movies, they work on another level as a sort of inside joke.

Now, with Gary Chapman’s “Valiant,” a British team of animators and actors has given the Disney treatment, or the equivalent, to a more recent myth. It is a myth that we all, especially the British, take – or used to take – much more seriously, namely that of Britain’s heroic resistance to Hitler and the Nazis.

Except that Hitler and the Nazis don’t appear in this film. Neither do the British. Their machines, especially war machines, and buildings appear from time to time, and at one point a voice that presumably belongs to Sir Winston Churchill is heard. But otherwise World War II, on this showing, is a war of animals. Mainly birds.

The heroic birds are pigeons of the Royal Homing Pigeon Service, a real entity that is said to have made real contributions to the real war effort. But here, amid the unreality we have come to expect from the movies, it is run by the pigeons themselves, who enthusiastically conform to recognizable human archetypes.

As, of course, do the bad birds, who are falcons in the service of the Nazis – and in Nazi-gothic uniforms that would seem to encumber a falcon. Naturally, these creatures are given to the “Ve haff vays of making you squawk” school of movie villainy.

That line, by the way, actually occurs, uttered by the most evil of the Nazi birds, Von Talon (voice of Tim Curry) to a terrified British pigeon called Mercury (John Cleese). It can hardly be said to count as news that a falcon should have ways of making a pigeon squawk, but the surprise, the moment of pomo frisson, comes when the exquisite tortures that poor Mercury has in store turn out to be neither human nor animal but yet more Disney drollery: an old Victrola recording of Tyrolean yodeling.

And when that doesn’t work there is a “truth serum,” administered in a suggestive if not actually obscene fashion, that is meant to produce equally hilarious results as Mercury abandons his “stiff upper beak” and announces his intention of talking about his “feelings.” It may be a war, that is, but no one actually gets killed, or even badly hurt. Or if they do, it’s no one we know. People, maybe, who otherwise don’t figure in this war. Even the bad guys get a good spanking, but, so far as we know, survive their encounter with British justice.

Disney would also clearly approve that the greatest hero is the littlest pigeon of all, a wood-pigeon called Valiant (Ewan Mc-Gregor) who is desperate to “do his bit” with the homing pigeons, and his sidekick, a raffish bag of filth called Bugsy (Ricky Gervais) that he finds hanging out, as pigeons tend to do, in Trafalgar Square.

The relationship between Valiant and Bugsy conforms to the Disney pattern between hero and sidekick – and that of DreamWorks’s “Shrek” movies, which were also produced by “Valiant’s” producer, John Williams. That is, the hero is youthful or physically robust, and brave, naive, or idealistic, while the sidekick is older, unashamedly wimpy, very talkative, and knowledgeable in the ways of the world.

The pattern is also carried out in the way that the movie is, even more than it is visual caricature, a platform for gags translating human situations and language, at least those that will be familiar to the children from the movies, into what are easily imaginable as being predicated of animals.

Thus the pigeon drill sergeant (Jim Broadbent) says to his pigeon recruits: “I will make birds of you turkeys if it kills you.”And what about that rollicking pigeon-equivalent of “Allons-y,” “Let’s make wind!”

Obviously stereotypes are the lifeblood of such a movie. The French Resistance, led by a sexy mouse called Charles De Girl (Sharon Horgan), can’t let the brave Brit air-pigeons go without a chorus, again on the Victrola, of Edith Piaf belting out “Non, je ne regrette rien,” while the wicked Von Talon hums along in the shower to – see if you can guess – “The Ride of the Valkyries.”

Such details tell us where we are, namely in cartoonland. That, as we have all now learned, is the place where even a war in which many of the kiddies’ grandparents might have taken part is made safe and non-threatening to them, heroism and villainy alike are rendered comical and virtually without cost, and there is an uplifting moral to take away – such as “It’s not a bloke’s wingspan that counts; it’s the size of his spirit.”

True enough, I suppose, but with all the charmingly fake surroundings here, if I were a kid I don’t know that I’d be inclined to believe that.