If you have been following the world of animation closely, you have probably heard rumblings about Brad Bird’s “Ray Gunn.” Bird has dreamed of this gritty, futuristic noir for more than 30 years, long before he directed any of his features. The script circulated in 1996, and Turner Feature Animation put it into development before Bird turned his attention to “The Iron Giant” at Warner Bros. In the early 2000s, the project went through periods of revival and turnaround, with composer Michael Giacchino first reading the script around 2009, while Bird again prioritized other projects. Now, after all this time, Skydance and Netflix have teamed up to make the dream a reality. While some things have changed, like shifting from Bird’s desired 2D hand-drawn animation to CGI, the script, he says, has largely stayed the same. But will it come together as he imagined?
Ahead of “Ray Gunn’s” world premiere at the London Film Festival, Netflix brought Next Best Picture to its Animation Studios for an early, behind-the-scenes look at the film and exclusive conversations with Bird, Giacchino, and more.
In many ways, the development delay makes sense. Film noir isn’t the first genre you think of when it comes to family-friendly entertainment. But with Netflix footing the bill, they’re taking more risks, even butting up against the limits of a PG rating. “Ray Gunn” opens with a fairly brutal (by family-animated standards) fight sequence in an office, as Ray, voiced by Sam Rockwell, investigates a case. Slammed through walls by a giant alien woman concealing extra arms, Ray gets a lot more than he bargained for in this latest job. He’s a private investigator, though not a particularly successful one. But he’s well-known enough around Metropia to keep getting jobs. Like any good movie P.I., he’s a little rough around the edges, typically down on his luck, but he usually knows a guy who knows a guy who can help him break a case. He’s got a gruff alien partner, Eyera (Tom Waits), who helps keep things in line. He’ll need that help on a massive new case when hired by the husband of the biggest movie star around, Venus Nova (Scarlett Johansson), who wants proof that she’s up to no good.
It’s your sort of standard film noir case, but the retro-futuristic lens gives it an entirely new angle. Bird envisioned “Ray Gunn” as the future, but as it might’ve been imagined in 1939. Metropia is a sprawling mega-city, with layer upon layer of buildings, some stretching a mile into the air. The city’s design is a mash-up of Hugh Ferriss’s imposing blockiness and the sleek curves of Streamline Moderne. Metropia is a big, bright utopia, but a seedy underworld lurks behind every alley. So, of course, inspired by the iconic film noirs of the ’30s and ’40s, it’s full of harsh shadows, silhouettes, and fog.
Bird originally conceived “Ray Gunn” as a 2D animated film, a goal he had maintained when Netflix sought to revive the project. Unfortunately, animating such a huge film in a hard-drawn style proved too expensive, even for Netflix’s deep pockets. Faced with the choice of scaling down the film or moving to CG, Bird opted to keep it big. “The scale [of the film] that we made is the scale that I wanted it to be. It’s not a small movie,” he says. “I set out to make the film a certain way, and the best way to get the closest to how I pictured it was through CG.” As Bird describes this shift, you can tell there’s a bit of lingering disappointment there, though he’s clearly proud of the film they’ve made. Still, watching the footage, whenever a character looks a bit rubbery, it’s hard not to have a pang of regret for what could’ve been.
The stylization throughout “Ray Gunn” extends to the music too. Giacchino and Bird bonded over their love of Henry Mancini’s “Peter Gunn” theme music, which had the evocative, gritty, jazzy vibe the filmmakers wanted. Speaking about finding inspiration from “Peter Gunn” and The B-52’s “Planet Claire,” Giacchino says, “What I love about art is, art inspires the next round of art, constantly. Art is kind of an evolutionary process.” More than 20 years after Bird gave Giacchino his first feature film as a composer, the two have clearly maintained a close relationship. “I feel so fortunate to be able to work in a medium where I can actually honor and play with the things that I love in the artistic world, and make something new out of them,” he says. “Brad’s movies always allow me to do that.”
Throughout our time together, whenever Giacchino said “Brad’s movie,” Bird corrected him. “Our movie,” he would say.
Beyond the noir inspirations, Bird has clearly set his mind on quite modern themes within “Ray Gunn.” Both humans and aliens of all sorts populate Metropia, but the society has clear lines drawn between the two. For the most part, aliens are relegated to janitorial careers and the like, and aren’t given the respect of full personhood. Ray looks past this, wholeheartedly trusting Eyera as his partner, regardless of his alien origins. But the film doesn’t shy away from using language all-too-familiar in today’s climate, like some characters referring to some aliens as “illegals,” and Eyera calling out another character as “xenophobic.” “It’s not meant to be a sociological term paper though,” Bird notes. “It’s meant to be a good time at the movies. And hopefully you’ll have connections with it that have to do with just being alive on the planet Earth, you know?” Netflix only showed us the first act, so we didn’t get to see how deep these themes go, but it’s clear Bird wanted “Ray Gunn” to explore deeper, darker ideas while still preserving the entertainment value.
Will the long wait for “Ray Gunn” be worth it? It’s entering an unusually crowded year for animation. At both the studio level and among the indies, the Best Animated Feature race is full of worthy contenders, from “Toy Story 5,” “Wildwood,” “Tangles,” and Netflix’s other contender, “In Waves.” As the branch has moved steadily away from Disney and Pixar in recent years, the door is still open for a more filmmaker-driven picture, like “Ray Gunn,” to impress the Academy. We’ll see more soon enough as the movie premieres in just a few weeks.
Check out our exclusive podcast interviews with Director Brad Bird, Composer Michael Giacchino, Art Director Wendell Luebe, Animation Director Jason Ryan, and Visual Effects Supervisor Adel Abada below.
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