Ray Gunn: Brad Bird gives film noir a jetpack, aliens and a thoroughly suspicious Scarlett Johansson
Imagine Humphrey Bogart waking up in a world where the cars fly, the buildings are a mile high and the chap sitting next to you at the bar has seventeen tentacles and an unhealthy interest in your internal organs. Welcome to Ray Gunn, the forthcoming Netflix animated science fiction film from Brad Bird, the director of The Iron Giant, The Incredibles and Ratatouille. It’s a futuristic detective story that looks as though somebody has tipped the contents of a 1930s Hollywood studio into a blender along with a large quantity of vintage science fiction magazines. Then turned the blender up to eleven.
Our hero is Raymond Gunn, voiced by Sam Rockwell, a hard-boiled private detective operating in Metropia, a colossal retro-futuristic metropolis in which humanity shares the pavements, skyscrapers and presumably rather overcrowded public transport with a variety of extraterrestrial species. It’s the future as imagined from 1939, when everyone assumed that tomorrow’s cities would be impossibly tall, aircraft would resemble polished chrome cigars and men would continue wearing suits and ties even while being disintegrated by Martian death rays.
Unfortunately for Raymond, private investigation is not quite the glamorous profession it once was. Tiny robotic snoops called pry bots have taken over much of the detective business, leaving old-fashioned investigators struggling to make ends meet. Apparently, even in a world of flying cars and alien civilisations, the most frightening threat to employment remains automation. Somewhere in Metropia, a private detective is probably complaining that artificial intelligence has stolen his job while his robot accountant prepares his bankruptcy paperwork.
Raymond does, however, have a partner. Eye-Ra, voiced by Tom Waits, is a grizzled, one-eyed alien who presumably possesses considerable wisdom about the darker corners of the universe. Casting Waits as a disreputable extraterrestrial detective’s sidekick is one of those decisions that makes such immediate sense that you wonder why somebody hasn’t already built an entire film franchise around it. The man sounds as though he has been gargling broken glass in a scrapyard on Jupiter since approximately 1957.
Things become considerably more complicated when Venus Nova enters the picture. Voiced by Scarlett Johansson, Venus is Metropia’s biggest multimedia superstar, a glamorous celebrity whose personal scandals are threatening to turn into something considerably more terminal. Ray becomes entangled in a case involving murder, aliens and the sort of dangerous woman who traditionally enters a private detective’s office just as the saxophone player starts earning his money.
Whether Venus is an innocent woman caught in an elaborate conspiracy or someone whose idea of a romantic evening involves pushing her dinner companion out of a flying automobile remains to be seen. Either way, Raymond’s chances of enjoying a quiet week appear to have vanished rather comprehensively.
The visual style is where Ray Gunn really starts showing off. Metropia is an enormous Art Deco fever dream of soaring skyscrapers, airborne traffic and streamlined architecture. It owes something to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, the science fiction serials of the 1930s and the atmospheric detective films of the following decade. There are jetpacks, ray guns and enough dramatic lighting to keep a small nation of cinematographers employed until the heat death of the universe.
It’s also a world that appears to have taken one look at modern town planning and decided that what every city really needs is another thousand floors. Anyone currently experiencing the delights of commuting through central London might appreciate the flying cars, although we suspect that Metropia’s air traffic control system has already discovered the traditional British solution to congestion: charge everyone a fortune to enter the city centre and then dig up the remaining roads.
What’s particularly interesting is that Brad Bird has been trying to make this film for more than thirty years. He originally conceived Ray Gunn before directing The Iron Giant, but the project spent decades languishing in development limbo. Studios apparently struggled with the concept of an animated film aimed at a more mature audience, despite several generations of Japanese animators having demonstrated that cartoons can contain practically anything, including philosophical examinations of human consciousness, apocalyptic warfare and schoolgirls piloting enormous robots.
Bird’s original ambition was to produce the film using traditional hand-drawn animation. The finished production instead uses computer animation, with Skydance Animation and Cinesite helping to realise a city whose extraordinary architecture would probably have driven the average 1990s animation studio into financial ruin before the opening credits were finished.
The director has described the basic premise as a collision between The Maltese Falcon and Buck Rogers. Which, frankly, sounds like the sort of film pitch that should have resulted in somebody immediately handing him a suitcase full of money rather than making him spend three decades attempting to persuade Hollywood to loosen its purse strings.
The voice cast is an impressive collection of familiar talent. Alongside Rockwell, Johansson and Waits, we have Alan Tudyk, Matt Berry, Bobby Cannavale, Michelle Rodriguez and Patton Oswalt, among others. Matt Berry in particular seems an excellent addition to a world where almost everyone appears to be harbouring an outrageous secret. His voice alone could probably persuade an unsuspecting alien population to purchase a fleet of second-hand spaceships with absolutely no functioning engines.
Composer Michael Giacchino, whose previous collaborations with Bird include The Incredibles and Ratatouille, returns to provide the music. We imagine that the temptation to accompany every appearance of a glamorous femme fatale with a mournful trumpet was probably quite considerable.
Underneath the fabulous machinery and enormous architecture, however, there appears to be a rather interesting question. What happens to the old-fashioned human detective when technology has made his profession largely redundant? Raymond Gunn is a man who belongs to a disappearing world, attempting to solve a very human mystery in a city that has apparently decided humanity is rather yesterday’s news.
Given that this is a science fiction website, we’re contractually obliged to point out that there is almost certainly a metaphor about artificial intelligence lurking somewhere in there, probably behind the filing cabinet with a smoking revolver and a forged passport.
The newly released trailer certainly looks gorgeous. The animation mixes exaggerated cartoon character designs with lavishly detailed environments, creating something that feels recognisably connected to Bird’s earlier work while embracing the atmosphere of a much darker detective story. There is enough retro-futuristic visual splendour on display to send an entire convention of dieselpunk enthusiasts into a state of dangerous excitement.
Here at SFcrowsnest, we have considerable affection for science fiction that remembers the future doesn’t necessarily have to look like an Apple Store. Sometimes it can resemble a colossal 1930s railway terminal populated by extraterrestrial criminals, washed-up detectives and glamorous women whose husbands would very much like to know where they’ve been spending their evenings.
Whether Ray Gunn can sustain its fabulous visual imagination across an entire feature film remains to be seen, but Brad Bird has accumulated a sufficiently interesting body of work to make this one worth keeping an eye on. Possibly a large, bloodshot alien eye belonging to Tom Waits.
Ray Gunn opens in selected cinemas, including limited 70mm screenings, on 4 December 2026, before arriving on Netflix on 18 December 2026.
In the meantime, watch the trailer above, pour yourself something suitably noir and remember the first rule of futuristic private investigation. If a beautiful woman walks into your office carrying a mysterious briefcase, it’s probably time to check whether your jetpack has a full tank.
