Genius animation director Brad Bird is back with his highly anticipated passion project, Ray Gunn, featuring a voice cast of Sam Rockwell, Scarlett Johansson and Tom Waits, screening at the 2026 BFI London Film Festival. My high expectations have been met and then some with this thrilling endlessly watchable animated spectacle.
Plot in a nutshell
In the retro-futuristic city of Metropia, private detective Ray Gunn (Rockwell) and his alien partner Eye-Ra Kadok (Waits) are the only honest investigators in a dishonest world, and they’re on the verge of going out of business. That is until they take on a case involving the city’s most famous pop singer Venus Nova (Johansson) which quickly spirals into a tangled web of murder, corruption and conspiracy.
The Review
It’s been almost 10 years since we’ve had a Brad Bird movie. The Incredibles 2 feels like a lifetime ago, and the last original animated film by Bird is almost two decades old (2007’s brilliant Ratatouille). Needless to say, the man’s cartoon talents have been sorely missed. The passion project that he’s been work on all for most of that time away has now finally been unveiled and I’m elated to report that it is an absolute banger.
What instantly takes your breath away from the opening shot of Ray Gunn, and will continue to do so until the last frame, is the movie’s wildly imaginative world. It’s The Fifth Element meets The Maltese Falcon in both design and spirit, the concrete jungle of a megalopolis suspended in the sky with futuristic inventions, holograms, flying cars, jetpacks, and all sorts of other technological gadgets filling practically every bit of real estate in the frame. Making the world that much more interesting is that it’s a galactic melting pot of alien and human culture; an endlessly fascinating diverse world. We are kids in Bird’s visual-eye candy store and it’s impossible to get enough.
The style of animation has an old school, unrefined, hand-drawn vibe to it, very Incredibles-like, which is a perfect throwback for the film’s 1950s film noir characters and narrative. The look of the film grips you, but the genre’s idiosyncratic tropes and flourishes keep you in place. There’s the gumshoe PI with a working moral compass in a world drowning in moral ambiguity, the attractive femme fatale with secrets of her own, a murder mystery implicating multiple suspects, foreboding gangsters and low IQ goons, shady side-characters, ulterior motives and even the dramatic shadows and expressive lighting that make up the signature look of film noir.
The world of Blade Runner immediately springs to mind, with building-sized hologram ads giving the sci-fi classic a direct nod, but Bird found a way to mix all of his sci-fi and film noir inspirations into something that stands out all on its own. It helps having a watertight screenplay that perfectly balances the business of human emotions with the pleasure of having a laugh-out-loud blast. There’s even room for some social commentary on racism, surveillance and the cruel world of showbusiness that will fly over a lot kids’ heads but should be appreciated by most adults.
In order to make the magic really work, Bird needed the perfect voice cast ensemble and that’s exactly what he got, led by Rockwell, Johansson and Waits who all do stellar work. Ray, Venus and Eye-Ra are well-rounded characters who fit classic stereotypes with just enough variety to be interesting and get the audience fully engaged in their respective predicaments. Brad Bird is back baby!
Next to All of a Sudden, this is the first film I’m aching to watch again.