Director Brad Bird has spent nearly his entire career begging American moviegoers to understand: Not all animated movies are for kids. "It is NOT a genre," he said in 2004, repeating himself, "it is an art form that can do ANY genre." And for almost as long as he's been dreaming of a Hollywood that catches up to Japan, France, and the rest of the world's appreciation for animated art, he's been working on Ray Gunn, a retrofuturist murder mystery he scripted before directing his debut feature, 1999's The Iron Giant. In 2026, Ray Gunn is finally a real movie — and a meta-polemic echoing every argument Bird has ever made for what animation can be for grown-ups.
Reunited with his old pal John Lasseter under the Skydance Animation banner, Bird has realized his lifelong dream of sending detective Ray Gunn (Sam Rockwell) on a hoverbike-driven investigation bursting with art deco megastructures and laser-beam shootouts. That's not to say older kids won't enjoy what Bird's cooked up, assuming they also love Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place or Robert Aldrich's The Big Knife. It's just that Bird doesn't seem to give a shit.
He's made exactly the movie he set out to make: a stunning, almost overstuffed sci-fi noir with no interest in pandering to the under-10 cartoon demographic. And what a world he's built. Skydance has spared no expense in matching the technical wizardry of Bird's Pixar films, The Incredibles and Ratatouille, and the result looks, at all times, like concept art come to life.
Ray and his wisecracking, one-eyed alien partner Eye-Ra (Tom Waits) zip around a sprawling retrofuture city in pursuit of the truth behind a murder tied to glamorous diva Venus Nova (Scarlett Johansson). Every inch of the metropolis feels inhabited, from its towering architecture to the uneasy coexistence of its human and extraterrestrial citizens. Bird has a lot on his mind, too: racial tensions, technology's encroachment on art, AI's potential to erase human creativity, and an economy in which corporations act like criminals, criminals act like corporations, and a private eye can barely make rent because he's too busy playing hero.
He had his shot and took it. Bird can't balance every idea he's crammed into Ray Gunn, and none cuts as deep as The Iron Giant’s post-war paranoia or Ratatouille's ode to artistic expression. But moment to moment, it hardly matters.
The movie is a feast of visual action, every frame as dense with production design (and jokes) as Bird's best Simpsons episodes. You'll want to stare endlessly into the futuristic art deco landscapes and hit rewind on the intricate, single-shot rumbles that punctuate Ray's gumshoe work. Bird's eye for composition and movement hasn't dulled a bit.
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