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. If anything, the decades he’s spent imagining this world have made him more ravenous to show it all off.
Maybe most startling is how mature Ray Gunn feels. Rockwell slings more wisecracks than Humphrey Bogart, but Ray’s pursuit of answers leaves him as torn up and bruised as if he were hunting for the Maltese Falcon. Michael Giacchino’s score insists to our ears this isn’t parody or pastiche but the continuation of a legacy.
Luckily, Bird, ever the cheeky humorist, also gets plenty of laughs from smashing 1930s detective tropes against laser guns and alien antics. Waits’ wall-crawling Eye-Ra, whose Mike Wazowski-esque monocular anatomy makes him a walking spy camera for Ray, is a hoot. The singer-actor’s gravely timbre makes him the most grounded, sensible character in the whole picture, despite being a lanky green sleuth constantly on the edge of “one last job.” His only voiceover rival is Matthew Berry as slimy mob boss Slugsy, who’d fit right in with the cast of The Big Combo.
Bird nails the physical comedy, too. A shakedown involving two of Slugsy’s extraterrestrial heavies — one of whom is somehow the second animated riff on Peter Lorre we’ve seen this year — builds and builds and builds until everyone’s bodies are melded together by a molecule-scrambling pistol. The whole shootout, which rolls from hallways to turbo-elevators, plays like a Bugs Bunny cartoon colliding with a Dana Andrews brawl. The gags in Ray Gunn are gloriously silly, but Bird never sacrifices a sense of danger either.
Perhaps the biggest surprise is that Ray Gunn is, improbably, a deeply romantic movie. As Ray investigates Venus Nova’s connection to the central murder, he falls for her hard. (Johansson delivering perhaps her most flirtatious, femme-fatale-iest voice performance certainly helps.) For all the hard-boiled cynicism, Bird has a soft spot for two people letting their guards down. In one magical, zero-gravity sequence, Ray and Venus dance away their hardened exteriors and melt into each other’s eyes. The competition isn’t exactly fierce, but it might be the most romantic moment in an American animated movie since “Kiss the Girl” in The Little Mermaid. For a filmmaker celebrated for kinetic action, Bird’s ability to make a weightless embrace feel monumental is a lovely treat.
Stunning, snappy, and mannered like its nonexistent live-action counterpart from the 1950s, Ray Gunn really delivers. Bird does it all. Maybe too much! But after more than 30 years of false starts — through his Pixar triumphs, his detours into live-action spectacle with Tom Cruise and George Clooney, and an industry that couldn’t quite imagine who this movie was for — he’s finally gotten his shot. He doesn’t flinch. Here is a sophisticated animated adventure comedy for adults, a kind of movie that basically doesn’t exist in mainstream Western animation. For all his frustration with Hollywood’s limitations, Bird’s ultimate rebuttal isn’t another angry mid-interview declaration about the medium’s potential. The movie proves his point.
It’s just a shame that this big-screen spectacle will play on so few big screens. At the very least, dim the lights when you catch it at home. Ray Gunn is one of the year’s best action movies, sci-fi thrillers, comedies, and romances all rolled into one.