Animation icon Brad Bird waited decades to finally get the money to make his original sci-fi noir film, Ray Gunn. So it’s oddly fitting that we had to wait so, so long to get our first look via a trailer. It was worth the wait and, hopefully, the film follows suit.
Coming to Netflix on December 18, and select theaters on December 4, it’s the latest animated feature from the director of The Iron Giant, Ratatouille, and The Incredibles. A futuristic detective story with an old-school feel. Ray Gunn stars Sam Rockwell as the titular character, a private eye who finds himself wrapped up in the world of femme fatale superstar Venus Nova, voiced by Scarlett Johansson. But there are also monsters, jet packs, flying cars, and all that awesome stuff too. Here’s the long-awaited trailer for Ray Gunn.
It’s a fun yet moody trailer, thanks in large part to that slowed-down version of “6 Underground” by Sneaker Pimps. Plus, it really plays up Bird’s pedigree and gives a strong sense that while it may look weird and playful, it’s serious, too.
We saw the first 30 minutes of the movie a few weeks back (you can read our full interview with Brad Bird later today), and that was the prevailing feeling. This is a cool movie. The dialogue is snappy. The action is fun. The jokes have some innuendo. And while there’s no cursing or gore, it feels like something made for adults, maybe even more than for their children. It truly feels like a classic film noir. The difference being the characters are in flying cars with laser guns.
That was something Bird cited as a reason why the movie, which he first started thinking about in the 1990s, took so long to make.
“What is weird about Ray Gunn is that I felt like investors, studio people, saw it as a strange outlier film, and I see it as something that is mainstream,” Bird told io9. “Like if you sit down and have a nice box of popcorn and a drink, you’re gonna have a good time watching this movie. And the fact that I had such trouble communicating that effectively? I don’t know why. I guess it’s that it deviates from what people expect of animation. It’s largely humans, and they’re doing things that they could easily do in a live-action movie, but I never saw it as live-action. At one point, someone said, ‘Would you be interested in doing it in live-action because it would work in live-action?’ But I just went, ‘Yeah, but it wouldn’t be Ray Gunn.’ This is the way I see it. So I’m really happy that we finally got to make it and that it exists now.”
We’ll have more from Bird, and on Ray Gunn, soon. It comes to theaters on December 4 and Netflix on December 18.
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