Brad Bird's retrofuturistic detective story gets a second trailer, with Sam Rockwell, Scarlett Johansson and Tom Waits in a city where buildings stretch a mile high.
Imagine a private eye whose job has been mostly handed over to tiny robots, and who keeps knocking on doors anyway. That’s Ray Gunn, and the second Ray Gunn trailer from Netflix is a very stylish look at him at work.
The film comes from Brad Bird, the two-time Oscar winner behind The Incredibles and Ratatouille. It’s a retrofuturistic animated sci-fi noir from Skydance Animation. It opens in select theaters and limited 70mm screens on December 4, then hits Netflix on December 18.
A city built a mile high
The setting is Metropia, a gigantic city in an alternate future as imagined from 1939. The new trailer goes straight in. Humans and aliens live side by side, flying cars cut across the sky and buildings climb a mile into it.
It’s a sunny kind of future, and Bird says that’s deliberate, with a catch. “You’re being hopeful with the city, but you’re still showing there’s a dark underbelly — things that happen in the shadows,” he said. So the optimism comes with long shadows, which is exactly what a noir needs.
The trailer also shows how the detective trade has changed. Tiny “pry bots” now handle much of the legwork, which leaves Raymond Gunn and his partner Eye-Ra among the last investigators still working cases the old-fashioned way. That’s a neat joke about progress, and it gives the pair a scruffy, analog charm in a polished city.
The voices behind the trench coats
Sam Rockwell voices Ray. Tom Waits plays Eye-Ra, Ray’s cyclopean alien partner. Waits’ voice on a one-eyed alien sidekick is a casting idea that seems obvious once you hear it. Scarlett Johansson is Venus Nova, a multimedia star and one of Metropia’s biggest and most controversial megastars. Her case ties together aliens, murder and Ray’s next headache. Netflix announced that trio back in April.
The supporting cast is deep. It includes Alan Tudyk, Matt Berry, Bobby Cannavale, Michael Chernus, Kether Donohue, Michelle Rodriguez, Aasif Mandvi, Matt Jones, Kathryn Hunter, John Ratzenberger, Justin Peck and Patton Oswalt.
Maltese Falcon, meet Buck Rogers
Bird has carried this idea for a long time. He first dreamed it up at the start of his career, and he has a one-line pitch for it. “The elevator pitch I came up with is The Maltese Falcon meets Buck Rogers,” he said in a Netflix Tudum feature. “I like both of those genres, and blending them together seemed fun, and a chance to play with a lot of very cinematic elements and extreme characters.”
The influences are the movies he grew up loving: Bogart detective pictures, the noir Out of the Past, and the worlds of Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade. Put those next to rocket-age sci-fi and you get a film that pairs fedora-and-cigarette-smoke attitude with flying cars and sky-high skylines.
Bird also has a broader point about the medium. “Animation is too fun a medium, and too interesting, to limit what kind of stories can be told,” he said. A hard-boiled murder mystery with an alien partner and a controversial megastar suits that idea well.
What to know before you go
Bird came up with the story himself and wrote the screenplay with Matthew Robbins. John Lasseter, Bird, Lisa Beroud, David Ellison and Dana Goldberg produce for Skydance Animation. Bird signed on to direct in 2022, and the film was part of Netflix’s Annecy slate this year.
The 70mm screenings are the thing to circle on the calendar. A city a mile tall seems made for a big, wide screen. If you can’t get to one, December 18 is the date for the couch.