Writer-director Brad Bird has been thinking about Ray Gunn for a very long time. In fact, the filmmaker can trace the animated sci-fi noir’s origins back over three decades, long before he made his mark on Hollywood with The Iron Giant (1999), three cherished Pixar animated movies, The Incredibles (2004), its sequel Incredibles 2 (2018), and Ratatouille (2007), as well as live-action spectacles like Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (2011) and Tomorrowland (2015). Now, after giving up on the project years ago, Bird has been given the chance to finally bring Ray Gunn to life with help from Netflix, Cinesite, and Skydance Animation.
Ray Gunn follows the titular private eye detective Raymond Gunn (voiced by Sam Rockwell), who, along with his alien partner Eyera (Tom Waits) and a famous pop star named Venus Nova (Scarlett Johansson), is drawn into a life-changing case involving a string of mysterious murders in the alternate futuristic city of Metropia. This plot is a distinctly “Birdian” collision of influences, blending the optimistic retro-futurism of classic science fiction with the shadowy themes of noir. Across Metropia’s sprawling streets, gleaming visions of the future coexist with corruption and deception.
In a roundtable discussion with DiscussingFilm, Bird reflected on the decades-long journey to making Ray Gunn, the classic noirs that inspired it, what it might have looked like if he had been able to make it 30 years ago, and his honest feelings about it going to streaming.
‘Buck Rogers’ Meets ‘The Maltese Falcon’
For Brad Bird, who directed, produced, and co-wrote the script alongside Matthew Robbins, best known for co-writing Crimson Peak (2015) and Pinocchio (2022) with Guillermo del Toro, Ray Gunn‘s appeal has always been rooted in the tension between two seemingly contradictory visions of the future. “The elevator pitch that I boiled it down to is Buck Rogers meets The Maltese Falcon [1941],” Bird notes as the film’s immediate influences. “You take the slightly more naive, optimistic design view of the future, and then you add a dark underbelly to it.”
The filmmaker wanted to move away from the traditionally bleak aesthetic associated with cinematic visions of the future. Rather than another dystopian city drenched in darkness and decay, Ray Gunn imagines a world that looks genuinely exciting and colorful, yet is populated by the lies, corruption, and moral compromises that have always defined film noir. “Usually in these stories, the city is kind of a grimy place,” Bird states. “In Blade Runner [1982], it’s acid rain and this future you don’t want to be in. But I thought there was something fun about juxtaposing a positive vision of the city of the future, and then showing that still there’s going to be corruption and lies.”
A Once Abandoned Story
This concept has been sitting with Bird for decades, yet he’s quick to clarify that Ray Gunn was neither something he simply left in a drawer and easily pulled out nor something he’s continued obsessing over for 30 years. “That poster is 30 years old, believe it or not,” Bird says of the film’s main teaser poster. “Some people might say, ‘He just took some old idea out of his closet.’ But no, I actually had given it up for dead long ago.”
In his initial attempts to get Ray Gunn made, the industry proved unwilling to take the necessary leap. When another opportunity eventually emerged decades later, he still had to fight to get the project out of the studio system, free it from its previous constraints, and find financiers and a distributor willing to embrace all of its ambitious weirdness. “In other words, it wasn’t passive,” he tells us. Though he makes clear: “I haven’t been stewing about it for 30 years… all I can say is I thought it was a good idea then and I still think it’s a good idea now.”
What ‘Ray Gunn’ Might Have Looked Like 30 Years Ago
Had Brad Bird made Ray Gunn when he first conceived it 30 years ago, the movie would have looked considerably different. “It would have been hand-drawn,” he plainly states. “There would have been a lot of computers used, but the look would have been a little closer to that [hand-drawn], and I think that would have been cool.” Bird’s affection for classic 2-D hand-drawn animation remains strong (this is a storyteller who was mentored by the original greats at Walt Disney Animation, after all), even though the industry’s perception of its commercial viability has changed dramatically.
In working with Netflix and Skydance Animation, Bird has embraced his now-completed, computer-animated version of Ray Gunn, particularly given the imposing scale of the ambitious narrative he wanted to tackle. However, as he tells us, he remains unconvinced by the industry’s assumption that hand-drawn animation cannot be commercially successful.
Brad Bird: “My love of hand-drawn is not shared by nervous executives. Studios think audiences won’t accept that, which I don’t agree with. So, it became seen as a commercial decision [to make Ray Gunn in 3D CG]. But you are collaborating with a lot of people, and if somebody is putting forth the resources possible to make the movie, you have to play ball. I’ve done three films in computer animation. I think a hand-drawn version [of Ray Gunn] would have been great, but I love the version we made. So, I’m fine with it either way. I don’t agree that hand-drawn animation isn’t commercial, which is what the industry believes. A lot of studios believe that.”
Why Character Animation Matters
In Brad Bird’s eyes, what truly distinguishes Ray Gunn from both his previous work and other modern animated films is how well his team delivered on the specific craft of character animation. “You can animate abstract shapes. You can make a dog morph into an ostrich if you want. All that stuff is animation, but it’s not character animation,” Bird explains. “Character animation kind of separates the pros from the amateurs.”
Bird’s philosophy is that animation should communicate character and story through even the smallest physical details and movements. A character’s posture, mannerisms, facial features, and how they simply exist in a room can tell an audience something about who they are. “Everyone is doing it in a different way [in Ray Gunn],” Bird claims. “Everybody is existing in their space in a different, unique way, and that’s what animation is great at if you do it right.”
However, as the veteran animator tells us, that kind of attention to detail is tedious, expensive, and time-consuming. People naturally begin to standardize things, and that standardization can creep into even the tiniest details of character design. Like teeth, for example.
Brad Bird: “Animators do the same teeth. It’s always game-show-host chiclets, but everybody’s teeth are different, and that difference is cool! Warren Beatty has front and back teeth that meet in the middle in a unique way. It’s handsome, but it’s also quirky. It’s not normal. If you look at Medusa from The Rescuers [1977], which my mentor Milt Kahl animated, it was a former wife that he did, but what she would be like if she went to seed a little bit (laughs). It’s fantastic, and it’s not game-show-host teeth. We gave Venus Nova in Ray Gunn a little bit of space between her two front teeth. That, to me, is the name of the game.”
The Subtle Animation Feats of ‘The Incredibles‘ and ‘Ray Gunn’
Bird remembers a sequence from The Incredibles where Bob/Mr. Incredible and Lucius/Frozone simply sit in a car and talk. “They’re technically not doing anything that you’re supposed to do in animation,” he fondly recalls. “These are two guys just sitting in a car. That’s not animation. In animation, you’re supposed to be juggling something while you’re doing a little dancing! They’re just inhabiting a car.”
Brad Bird: “When I wrote the scene and gave it to animators, people were actually fighting each other over who would get to do it! All they are doing is sitting and talking. It should be boring, but it isn’t boring because they are two distinct characters that are talking about another distinct time, and you have to feel all of that in the way that they are subtly moving.”
Viewers can find that same attention to seemingly mundane behavior in Ray Gunn. “There are scenes like that in this,” Bird says. “There are quiet scenes, but there are also big action scenes that kind of go haywire.” Bird sees this combination of extremes as what makes character animation so powerful. The biggest action sequences can be spectacular, but audiences need to believe in the characters inhabiting them for any of it to matter.
The Noir Classics Behind ‘Ray Gunn’
Brad Bird’s noir influences stretch well beyond The Maltese Falcon and Blade Runner. His other touchstones include Out of the Past (1947), The Big Sleep (1946), L.A. Confidential (1997), and Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing (1956). “Probably the best film out of all of them is Chinatown,” Bird declares of the 1974 classic. “Chinatown is a perfect movie, and if we could be 1/10 as good as Chinatown, that would be glory for me.”
For Bird, animation provides an unusual avenue to take the heightened personalities of the noir genre and push them much further. Ray Gunn isn’t simply a noir detective story rendered through animation. The medium itself offers an opportunity to exaggerate the qualities that have always made noir cinema so distinct and create something genuinely fresh and original.
Brad Bird: “The difference between Ray Gunn and other noirs is animation. Because the animation process is laborious, there’s a tendency to standardize things to the point where they are no longer interesting, and I didn’t want to do that. I found a bunch of other people who didn’t want to do that either. In noir, the characters already are extreme, but that kind of thing plus animation — like, really good animation where you take your time and think about these things — that’s then unusual. Animation is able to bring things out of those situations that are unique.”
‘Ray Gunn‘ on the Small vs. Big Screen
While Ray Gunn will primarily reach audiences through Netflix this December holiday season, Bird has not abandoned his longtime love of theatrical exhibition. “This isn’t a gotcha because I have a very well-established love of the theatrical experience, and Netflix knows this and they don’t hate me for it,” Bird smiles. In this case, however, the most important thing is that Netflix allowed the film to exist at all. “In order to have people see it on a big screen, the movie has to exist, and Netflix took a big leap in backing this film and giving us the resources to make it on a big scale,” he explains.
Nonetheless, Brad Bird reaffirms that Ray Gunn was designed to be viewed on a large screen. “I hope that people can see this for the first time on a big screen, but I’m mostly happy that it exists, and that’s courtesy of Netflix.” Ultimately, after three decades of false starts, abandoned plans, and an industry that once wasn’t willing to take the chance in any fashion, Bird is simply happy that Ray Gunn is finally here. “We are showing it in a few places on a big screen,” Bird says excitedly. “But mainly, I’m grateful that we got to make it because I have been wanting to see this movie for a really long time.”
‘Ray Gunn’ hits theaters on December 18!
Release Date: December 18, 2026.
Directed by Brad Bird.
Screenplay by Brad Bird & Matthew Robbins.
Produced by Brad Bird, John Lasseter, Lisa Beroud, David Ellison, & Dana Goldberg.
Executive Producer: Hannah Minghella.
Main Voice Cast: Sam Rockwell, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Waits, Alan Tudyk, Matt Berry, Bobby Cannavale, Michael Chernus, Kether Donohue, Michelle Rodriguez, Aasif Mandvi, Matt Jones, Kathryn Hunter, John Ratzenberger, Justin Peck, Brad Bird, & Patton Oswalt.
Editor: Darren T. Holmes.
Composer: Michael Giacchino.
Production Companies: Skydance Animation & Cinesite.
Distributor: Netflix.
Runtime: 119 minutes.
Rated PG.
