Brad Bird has been trying to get “Ray Gunn” made for more than 30 years, and it finally lands on Netflix on December 18 via Skydance Animation. Seeing it in theaters won’t be easy, since it’s expected to get only a one-week limited run in very select cities, purely for Oscar eligibility.
We now have seven new images from “Ray Gunn” (above and below). The film still doesn’t have a trailer, let alone a teaser, so we’ll take what we can get. I do wish Bird had stuck with traditional 2D animation, as originally planned, because the CG look feels a bit generic, closer to a standard Pixar or DreamWorks release. Still, Bird has more than earned the benefit of the doubt. Anyone behind a run as remarkable as “The Iron Giant,” “The Incredibles,” and “Ratatouille” will always be in my good books.
In a new interview with Esquire, which is where these first-look images come from, Bird says Warner Bros. and Disney both toyed with the noir-meets-sci-fi film before shelving it, and he admits the resistance baffled him: “I thought, Really? How is this not good popcorn stuff.”
The idea dates back to the early ’80s, after Bird was fired from Disney. He made a hand-drawn test reel of Will Eisner’s “The Spirit,” only to find that studios wanted nothing “other than Broadway tunes.” Then he heard the B-52’s “Planet Claire,” with its “Peter Gunn”-style bass line and ’50s monster-movie beeps, and the name Ray Gunn clicked. In his words, it’s “the future as seen from 1939.”
The voice cast is stacked. Sam Rockwell plays the cynical detective, a casting that Tom Waits (who voices the one-eyed alien sidekick Eye-ra) suggested before Bird could bring it up himself. “It was just serendipity,” Bird says. Scarlett Johansson plays the femme fatale singer Venus Nova, Bobby Cannavale is her gold-digging husband who hires Ray to spy on her, and Matt Berry voices a gangster named Slugsy. Bird voices two of Slugsy’s henchmen, Ben Burtt handles the sound design, and Michael Giacchino composed the score.
Bird wanted the film to be rated PG-13, but Netflix insisted on PG so that “Ray Gunn” could appear on its “Kids” tab. Even so, Bird is blunt about who he made it for: “Quite honestly, I don’t think about kids at all.”
To get his $150 million-plus passion project made (a film he’s been developing since the late 1990s), Bird had to make a deal with the devil, so to speak, and that kind of arrangement inevitably comes with concessions. The reality is that no other studio was willing to finance it, and Netflix stepped in to make the film possible. The hope now is that creative compromises and studio meddling were kept to a minimum.
The film will star Hugh Jackman, while Hugh Grant and Owen Cooper are circling roles. Jack Thorne, who is red-hot, thanks to his acclaimed Netflix series’ "Adolescence” and “Lord of the Flies,” wrote the script.