Netflix released a second trailer for Ray Gunn on November 12. Brad Bird's animated science fiction noir opens in select theaters, including a run of 70mm screens, on Friday, December 4, and starts streaming on Netflix on Friday, December 18. Sam Rockwell voices Raymond Gunn, a private eye, and Scarlett Johansson voices Venus Nova, the music superstar he is hired to protect.
The setting is Metropia, a city of aliens, jet packs and flying cars, imagined the way the future looked from 1939. The case that drags Gunn in involves murder and something larger, and Bird has said the film's worry about technology creeping into private life is what pushes the bright world toward something darker.
The film's history is the real story. Bird first developed Ray Gunn at Turner in the 1990s, lost it when that company merged with Time Warner, and made The Iron Giant instead. He came back to it at Warner Bros. years later, got the rights returned, and finally made it at Skydance Animation. It is his first feature since Incredibles 2.
Bird has been clear that this is not a film pitched at five-year-olds, and the noir framing backs that up. A trailer cannot prove three decades of waiting paid off. It does show one of the most distinctive-looking animated films of the year, and a 70mm screen is the place to see it.
