As part of their presentation at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival this week, Netflix unveiled a brand new look at Brad Bird's Ray Gunn, an animated neo-noir science fiction mystery film that is expected to be a major player come Oscars season.
The streamer also announced that the long-awaited title will debut on its platform on December 18.
While plot details for the retrofuturist animated adventure are mostly under wraps, the film is "set in the gigantic city Metropia in an alternate future as seen from 1939, private eye Raymond Gunn is drawn into a case involving aliens, murder, and a multimedia star named Venus Nova."
The film may be slightly more adult-skewing than his previous works, but it'll still have his trademark charm “People don’t call futuristic weapons Ray Guns anymore. That’s an older term. So that automatically made me think of if you’re going to do a future detective movie, wouldn’t it be cool if it kind of looked like what we associate with classic detective movies? So that’s from the 30s and the 40s. This movie takes place in the future as seen from 1939. So it’s Buck Rogers meets the Maltese Falcon.”
He also confirmed that the film is fully animated, “I think the thing that I’m really unusually happy about is that we took on some really tough-to-do animation, but it is still animation. Some people will say, well, you know, that scene is subtle, so you must have done mo-cap or something like that. And I will proudly go, no, it was animation and animators acted out the scenes… It doesn’t look like live action. It feels like live action, but it doesn’t look like it. It’s a little bit like dance… The medium of animation is amazing.”
Sam Rockwell (Iron Man 2; Vice) will voice private investigator Raymond Gunn, while Scarlett Johansson (Black Widow; Jurassic World Rebirth) is set to voice multimedia star Venus Nova. The supporting cast is rounded out by Tom Waits (Seven Psychopaths; Bram Stoker's Dracula) as his alien colleague Eyera, John Ratzenberger (Toy Story; Cheers), and Jamie Costa (Robot Riot; What If...? - An Immersive Story ).
Brad Bird is directing, with a script he co-wrote with Matthew Robbins (Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio; Crimson Peak). Bird is also attached as a producer alongside Lisa Beroud and the Skydance Animation of John Lasseter, David Ellison, and Dana Goldberg.
Bird's frequent collaborator Michael Giacchino is also attached to compose the film's score, which is certainly music to our ears. Giacchino has scored five of Bird's six films, save for The Iron Giant.
This will be Bird's first film in eight years. His past directing credits, including The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, Tomorrowland, and Incredibles 2, have generally received widespread critical acclaim and found commercial success.
Ray Gunn was an original script developed by Bird and Robbins in the mid '90s, but it wasn't until 2022, when Skydance Animation stepped forward, that Bird actually received the go-ahead to begin production. The extended development of this film actually led Bird to step away from directing duties on Disney/Pixar's Incredibles 3, which is currently scheduled for a June 2028 release. He did, however, still pen the script and reportedly chose Peter Sohn (The Good Dinosaur; Elemental) as his replacement.
Ray Gunn starts streaming, exclusively on Netflix, on December 18!
Check out the first look images below: