If David Ellison wants a ticket to the Oscars this year, it probably won’t be with anything from Paramount or even (so far) Warner Bros, but if you say Netflix you may be on the right track. Ray Gunn, from Oscar-winning filmmaker Brad Bird (Ratatouille, The Incredibles), comes off Skydance Animation’s original deal with the streamer, counts Ellison among its producers, and is the kind of smart, visually sumptuous, intelligent toon that’s ripe for the Best Animated Feature category.
Having its world premiere on Saturday at the London Film Festival, Ray Gunn is a return to the Bogart-style detective classics of film noir like The Maltese falcon, the big sleep and other 1940s fashion gems Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Sam Spade. Throw some in Chinatown via Jack Nicholson or Altman The long goodbye, or Robert Mitchum in Goodbye my dear, and you see the idea, then think about the elements of The Jetsons Or Who Framed Roger Rabbit animated hits, combine them with Blade runner, and then add a little Madonna in Dick Tracy, pay a visit to Star Wars bar, mix them all together and you get something close to the world Bird has concocted here.
In other words, it’s a love letter to past and futuristic cinema. They call its main setting, Metropia, an “alternate future” channeling 1939, and that seems about right.
Whatever the inspirations, and there were obviously many, they all come from cinema and there is something delicious here. Bird, who also wrote the clever screenplay with Matthew Robbins, was fortunate to assemble a sensational voice cast to match an intriguing group of characters that make up this mashup.
Chief among them is Sam Rockwell’s Ray Gunn, an analog private asshole on a digital planet. The methods he uses are mostly all AI-based in this future world, but he operates as in San Francisco circa 1941, handling cases with his partner in grime Eye Ra Kadock (a wonderful Tom Waits), a cyclopian alien ready to accomplish any mission given to him. And boy do they get pissed when sultry Venus Nova (Scarlett Johansson), a struggling pop superstar, walks through the door. Of course, this is the murder she’s accused of, one of her ex-husbands, and the timing couldn’t be worse for her beleaguered record company Megamax, now run by her first husband and manager Barry Vogel (Alan Tudyk). Gunn is hired to keep her out of trouble, something she constantly finds herself in. Could there also be instant attraction here? They don’t need the scandal or nagging competition from Slugsy (Matt Berry), an alien mob boss who would like to bring Venus back under his control. There are all kinds of sides to Venus, lots of shady characters that complicate things, and in true Bogie-Bacall fashion, Ray can sort them all out while dealing with this colorful group.
Using dynamic CGI techniques to bring this world to life, Bird and his talented craftsmen manage to successfully merge two very different worlds, separated by centuries into a cohesive and viable original universe that somehow feels right. You don’t have to be a fan of black and Dark city detective yarns to enjoy the story, and it doesn’t matter if you’re not a sci-fi aficionado either. The human/extraterrestrial mix mixtures and helps make this Skydance Animation production an entertaining proposition for adults and even their children who are trained to see it, rather than the usual vice versa for “toons”.
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Rockwell is the perfect lead here, his voice working perfectly as a guy trying to hang on in a world missing out on his old-school style. Johansson, as a PR nightmare pop diva, matches her and even gets to show off her musical talents in a few of the songs provided by New Zealander Kimba. Among the rest of the cast, Bobby Cannavale plays Arnold Dam, co-owner of the Moon Room, the place where Venus-like sound Levity Love (Kether Donohue) performs covers of his hits. Police Captain Roz Drexler works the cop beat, nicely etched by Michelle Rodriguez. There’s also ex-cop Sam Stelfreeze (Michael Chernus) in the mix, and among others slimy Ralian smuggler Vanzine Kaluta (Kathryn Hunter).
Michael Giacchino’s score, which skillfully defines the changing moods, nicely avoids the clichés of the genre(s) while honoring them.
The producers are John Lasseter, Bird, Lisa Beroud, David Ellison and Dana Goldberg.
Title: Ray Gunn
Festival: London Film Festival
Distributer: Netflix
Release date: December 4, 2026 (in theaters); December 18 (broadcast)
Director: Brad Bird
Screenwriters: Brad Bird and Matthew Robbins
Cast: Sam Rockwell, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Waits, Bobby Cannavale, Alan Tudyk, Matt Berry, Michelle Rodriguez
Rating: PG
Operating time: 1h 59m
Gn entert
