‘Ray Gunn’ Review: Brad Bird Movie With Sam Rockwell, Scarlett Johansson

If David Ellison wants a ticket to the Oscars this year it most likely won’t be with anything from Paramount or even (so far) from Warner Bros, but if you said Netflix you might be on the right track. Ray Gunn, from Oscar-winning filmmaker Brad Bird (Ratatouille, The Incredibles), comes out of Skydance Animation‘s original deal with the streamer, counts Ellison among its producers, and is the kind of smart, visually sumptuous and clever ‘toon that is ripe for the Best Animated Feature category.

Having its world premiere Saturday at the London Film Festival, Ray Gunn is a throwback to Bogart-style film noir detective classics like The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep and other ’40s gems of the Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Sam Spade mode. Throw in a little Chinatown via Jack Nicholson or Altman’s The Long Goodbye, or Robert Mitchum in Farewell My Lovely, and you get the idea, and then think elements of The Jetsons or Who Framed Roger Rabbit animated hits, marry them with Blade Runner, and then toss in a bit of Madonna in Dick Tracy, take a visit to the Star Wars bar, stir them all together and you have something approximating the world Bird has cooked up here.

In other words it is a love letter to the movies past and futuristic. They call its main setting, Metropia, an “alternate future” channeling 1939, and that seems about right.

No matter what the inspirations, and there were clearly many, they all come from cinema and that’s a delicious thing here. Bird, who also wrote the nifty script with Matthew Robbins, has been blessed to collect a sensational voice cast to match an intriguing bunch of characters who make up this mashup.

Chief among them is Sam Rockwell‘s Ray Gunn, an analog private dick in a digital planet. The methods he uses are mainly all AI’ed in this futureworld, but he operates like its San Francisco circa 1941, handling cases with his partner in grime Eye Ra Kadock (a wonderful Tom Waits), a cyclopian alien at the ready for any assignment that comes their way. And boy do they get a doozy when sultry Venus Nova (Scarlett Johansson), a troubled pop superstar, walks in the door. Of course its all about a murder she is accused of, one of her ex-husbands, and the timing couldn’t be worse for her beleaguered record company Megamax, now run by her first hubby and manager Barry Vogel (Alan Tudyk). Gunn is hired to keep her out of trouble, something she constantly finds herself in. Could there also be an instant attraction here? They don’t need the scandal or the nagging competition from Slugsy (Matt Berry), an alien mob boss who would like to bring Venus back under his purview. There are all sorts of sides to Venus, a lot of shady characters complicating things, and in pure Bogie-Bacall fashion Ray gets to sort them all out while dealing with this colorful group.

Using vibarant CGI techniques to bring this world to life, Bird and his talented artisans manage to successfully merge two very different worlds, centuries apart in a cohesive and viable original universe that somehow seems right. You don’t have to be a fan of noir and Dark City detective yarns to appreciate the story, and it doesn’t matter if you aren’t a sci-fi aficionado either. The human/alien blend blends and helps to make this Skydance Animation production an entertaining proposition for adults and even their kids who get dragged to see it, rather than the usual other way around for ‘toons.

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Rockwell is the perfect lead here, his voice work right on target as a guy who is trying to hang on in a world passing his old-school style right by. Johansson, as the PR nightmare pop diva, matches him and even gets to show off her musical chops in a couple of the songs provided by New Zealand’s Kimba. Among the rest of the cast, Bobby Cannavale scores as Arnold Dam, co-owner of the Moon Room, the place where Venus sound-alike Levity Love (Kether Donohue) performs covers of her hits. Working the cop beat is Police Capt. Roz Drexler, nicely etched by Michelle Rodriguez. There’s also former cop Sam Stelfreeze (Michael Chernus) in the mix, and among others the slimy ralien smuggler Vanzine Kaluta (Kathryn Hunter).

Setting the shifting moods expertly is Michael Giacchino’s score that nicely avoids the clichés of the genre(s) while still honoring them.

Producers are John Lasseter, Bird, Lisa Beroud, David Ellison and Dana Goldberg.

Title: Ray Gunn
Festival: London Film Festival
Distributor: Netflix
Release date: December 4, 2026 (theatrical); December 18 (streaming)
Director: Brad Bird
Screenwriters: Brad Bird and Matthew Robbins
Cast: Sam Rockwell, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Waits, Bobby Cannavale, Alan Tudyk, Matt Berry, Michelle Rodriguez
Rating: PG
Running time: 1 hr 59 mins