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Some private detectives take a while to close a case. Raymond Gunn has taken about three decades, which is long even by the standards of a man who works in a city where the trams fly. Brad Bird’s Ray Gunn now has a full-length trailer, a month before it opens in selected US cinemas on 4 December, some of them in 70mm, and three weeks before it lands on Netflix on 18 December. For a project that has spent most of its life as a rumour in animation circles, it’s practically sprinting.
We covered the basics when the first trailer appeared in September. Sam Rockwell voices Ray, a former policeman billed as the last human private eye in Metropia, a city designed as the future looked from 1939. Scarlett Johansson voices Venus Nova, the pop star who becomes his case and, inevitably, his problem. Tom Waits is Eye-ra Kadok, his one-eyed alien partner, which remains the single best piece of voice casting this century. Bird himself has called the film “Buck Rogers meets The Maltese Falcon”, and has the jetpacks and fedoras to prove it.
What’s changed since September is that people have actually seen it. Ray Gunn had its world premiere at the BFI London Film Festival on 10 October. That’s rather fitting for a film with a cast that has a decent smattering of British talent: Matt Berry plays Francis “Slugsy” Xavier, an alien mob boss, and Kathryn Hunter plays Vanzine Kaluta, one of his alien employees. The critics have been kind. At the time of writing it sits on 94% from 52 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, and 73 on Metacritic. So the full trailer is less a sales pitch than a victory lap with a saxophone solo.
The rest of the case file is equally colourful. Bobby Cannavale is Arnold Dom, Venus’s husband, and Alan Tudyk is Barry Vogel, her manager and also her first husband, which suggests Metropia’s divorce courts get through more paperwork than its police. Michelle Rodriguez plays police captain Roz Dexler, Michael Chernus a cop turned studio fixer, and Patton Oswalt, in a role description to treasure, plays “a hologram”. Bird voices a pair of Xavier’s henchmen himself. And he reportedly cast his son’s football coach, a gentleman known as Buck, as a weapons dealer, which is the kind of nepotism the industry could use more of.
Johansson also sings. The New Zealand musician Kimbra wrote three songs for Venus Nova, and Netflix has entered one of them, “Too Much to Ask”, for Oscar consideration. Michael Giacchino provides the score. Between the two of them, nobody in Metropia should ever have to walk down a rain-soaked alley in silence.
Then there’s that thirty-year journey. Bird first wrote Ray Gunn in the 1990s for Turner Feature Animation, which was then swallowed by the Time Warner merger, at which point Bird went off and made The Iron Giant instead. The project was announced at Skydance Animation in 2022, switched from hand-drawn to computer animation in 2023, and was at one point destined for Apple TV+ before Netflix picked it up. The finished film runs 119 minutes and reportedly cost upwards of $150 million. That puts it among the most expensive noirs ever made, and possibly the only one with a budget line for alien tentacles.
British readers should note that the December dates are for American cinemas and Netflix worldwide. We haven’t seen a UK theatrical date confirmed, so unless you were at the London Film Festival, your best chance of 70mm Metropia probably involves a transatlantic flight or a very large television. Either way, the case of the director who spent thirty years trying to get his detective on screen is nearly closed. In true noir fashion, it turns out the man who did it was Brad Bird all along.
Sources: Cartoon Brew, Wikipedia. Our earlier piece: Ray Gunn: Brad Bird gives film noir a jetpack, aliens and a thoroughly suspicious Scarlett Johansson.
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