Skydance Animation's 'Ray Gunn,' directed by Brad Bird, will premiere on Netflix On a balmy April afternoon at Abbey Road Studios in London, a 74-piece orchestra comprised of violinists, cellists, flautists and even an organ-payer, is packed into Studio One. The iconic room, which has hosted musical legends from Edward Elgar to Harry Styles, is painted “Toy Story” blue, a fitting color given the reason everyone is here today is to record the score for “Ray Gunn,” a new feature animation from Pixar legend Brad Bird, the brains behind “Ratatouille” and “The Incredibles.” The film, which has been gestating inside Bird’s mind for three decades, is not a Pixar or Disney project, however (more on which later), but a Skydance Animation production which will hit Netflix on Dec. 18 (it premieres at the BFI London Film Festival on Oct. 10). Directing the orchestra at Abbey Road is Bird’s longtime collaborator, composer Michael Giacchino.
He’s a detective, but it’s in the future.’” But the idea got shelved as other projects got in the way: there was his sophomore Pixar project “Ratatouille” followed by “The Incredibles 2” and, in between, live action fare “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol” and “Tomorrowland” as well as an abandoned attempt to adapt Will Eisner’s comic “The Spirit.” Bird, who describes his mind as a “big shop floor,” would come back and “tinker” with “Ray Gunn” every now and again, biding his time until he could bring it to life (the film fell through at other studios including Warner Bros.) It was “Mission: Impossible” that finally paved the way for what had effectively become Bird’s real-life mission: impossible. So when the opportunity arose to pitch the studio on another idea, “Ray Gunn” was the obvious choice. (The move also reunited Bird with Pixar co-founder John Lasseter, now the head of Skydance Animation.) “I never pitched it at Pixar because I felt like it wasn’t in Pixar’s wheelhouse exactly,” Bird explains, referring to the studio’s reputation for catering to younger audiences than the one he’s aiming at with “Ray Gunn.” “If you put a Pixar label on it people would go, ‘Oh well, it’s meant for the same audience that these other films were meant for,’ and inevitably some of them would go, ‘Well, my little Jimmy would be unhappy at this.’” Bird expands on the theme, pointing out there are “10 billion animated films” for children and far fewer for teenagers and adults, despite them comprising the majority of the movie-going audience. Making animated films for them “shouldn’t be a controversial decision,” Bird says, “and yet it was always treated that way by the ministers of resource allocation [at Pixar].” (He is returning to Pixar for his next project, a third “Incredibles” movie.) Skydance had a different take.
Bird won’t be drawn on whether he thinks Ellison will stick to his promise, made as part of his bid, that Skydance will produce at least 30 theatrical films a year. While Skydance may have become the latest lightning rod in an increasingly polarised and under pressure Hollywood, Bird is a pragmatist. Later in our conversation, he notes that after making “The Iron Giant” he took his nascent idea for “The Incredibles” to Pixar.
I’m going up to Pixar because they protect storytelling.” As it happens, protecting — versus exploiting — art is one of the themes of “Ray Gunn,” which follows the eponymous private detective (voiced by Sam Rockwell) as he uncovers a dastardly plot involving Venus Nova (Scarlett Johansson), a superstar singer with a huge secret. For Giacchino, the trick to scoring a film filled with so much intrigue is keeping the viewer guessing.
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