RAY GUNN Trailer Sends Brad Bird’s Hard-Boiled Detective Into a Sci-Fi Noir World Full of Trouble

Brad Bird has been trying to get Ray Gunn made for decades, and now we finally have a trailer showing us the wonderfully strange sci-fi noir movie he’s been carrying around in his head since the 1990s.

The filmmaker behind The Iron Giant, Ratatouille, and The Incredibles is taking classic detective noir and launching it into a retro-futuristic world filled with flying cars, jet packs, laser guns, monsters, aliens, and plenty of trouble.

Ray Gunn stars Sam Rockwell as Ray Gunn, a private detective who gets tangled up with glamorous superstar and femme fatale Venus Nova, voiced by Scarlett Johansson. From there, things appear to spiral into a colorful cosmic mystery.

The trailer has a playful but moody vibe, helped by a slowed-down version of Sneaker Pimps’ “6 Underground.” The movie looks strange, funny, stylish, and packed with cool sci-fi imagery, but Bird also appears to be treating the noir side of the story seriously.

I recently had the chance to watch the first 30 minutes of Ray Gunn, and I loved what I saw. This is a cool movie. The dialogue is snappy, the action is fun, and the humor includes some innuendo that makes it clear Bird isn’t making something aimed exclusively at kids.

There’s no cursing or gore, but Ray Gunn feels like an animated movie made with adults very much in mind. At its core, it plays like a classic film noir. It just happens to take place in a world where the detective can hop into a flying car and pull out a laser gun.

That unusual combination is also part of why Bird had such a difficult time getting the movie made. He previously explained:

“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. 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.”

Nothing about the concept necessarily demands animation, but that’s exactly what allows him to push this universe into such an exaggerated, imaginative place while keeping the hard-boiled detective story intact.

After spending so many years trying to bring Ray Gunn to life, Bird finally gets to show audiences exactly what he was fighting to make.

Ray Gunn will open in select theaters on December 4 before arriving on Netflix on December 18. Check out the trailer and let us know what you think!