30 Years Later, A Long-Dormant Sci-Fi Noir Is Finally Coming To Netflix
An iconic animation director's magnum opus has finally found a home.
Brad Bird is the king of sci-fi animation. From The Iron Giant to The Incredibles, he’s always been interested in genre projects. Even when he ventured into live-action, he stuck to this formula, for better (Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol) or for worse (Tomorrowland). But animation was where he started, and now he’s finally making the project of his dreams: Ray Gunn, an adult-skewing neo-noir sci-fi mystery animated feature.
Decades may have passed since the first draft of the script, but it’s now starting to look truly real, including first-look images from its eventual home, Netflix. Check them out below.
Sam Rockwell stars as the last human detective in a 1930s-esque future in Ray Gunn.
Netflix recently released a sneak peek at Ray Gunn, ahead of its eventual release later this year. We also got our first synopsis: “In Metropia, a gigantic city in an alternate future as seen from 1939, private eye Raymond Gunn (Sam Rockwell) is drawn into a case involving aliens, murder, and a multimedia star named Venus Nova (Scarlett Johansson).”
The story of Ray Gunn began in the mid- to late-1990s, when a misheard B-52s lyric inspired Brad Bird to tell a retro-futuristic story. Not much is known about its early stages, but a leaked script from 1996 has been floating around the internet for decades. Unfortunately, as Hollywood tends to work, other projects got in the way. First, it was shelved in favor of The Iron Giant, and he later pitched it to Pixar, but that resulted in The Incredibles instead.
But in recent years, Bird has prioritized this movie, which had long been left on the back burner. The upcoming Incredibles 3 will be directed not by Bird but instead by Elemental’s Peter Sohn. It will mark the first Incredibles movie not directed by Bird, but that also allows him to focus more on Ray Gunn.
Scarlett Johansson voices pop star of the future Venus Nova in Ray Gunn.
There are a lot of similarities between The Incredibles and Ray Gunn, from the future-as-seen-by-the-past aesthetic, the score by Michael Giacchino, and the sci-fi twist, but there’s one big difference: the target demographic. This one isn’t for animation fans. In fact, Bird is specifically courting the exact opposite audience. “There’s a big chunk of people who don’t watch animation,” Bird told Tudum. “That’s a group I’m anxious to persuade because it’s an amazing art form that is way too limited in people’s minds.”
It really seems like this is what Brad Bird’s career has been building toward. “It was always meant to be a blend of sci-fi and classic detective movies from the ’40s,” he said. “The elevator pitch I came up with is The Maltese Falcon meets Buck Rogers.”
