Ray Gunn opens in select theaters on December 4 and arrives on Netflix on December 18. The film premiered on October 10 at the London Film Festival.
A 30-odd-year passion project for director Brad Bird, Ray Gunn is a nifty sci-fi/film noir mashup that’s sumptuously designed and cleverly realized, but is slightly dinged by an overlong runtime and occasionally clunky story.
Set in the vast futuristic city of Metropia, Ray Gunn follows its titular private eye (voiced by Sam Rockwell) as he and his one-eyed alien partner, Eye-Ra (Tom Waits), investigate a case involving the world’s biggest pop star, Venus Nova (Scarlett Johansson), that leads to murder, corruption and other nefarious things. If that sounds pretty gritty for an animated film from the director of The Incredibles and Ratatouille, it is.
Ray Gunn definitely leans toward a slightly older demographic than the broader audience of Bird’s past films for Pixar, which is perfectly fine since animation can obviously be more than just one kind of movie made specifically for children. While it may not be a zany animated comedy for the whole family, Ray Gunn still offers its share of cartoon hijinks for anyone who does watch it with their kids. Ray’s particle blaster pistol yields some raucous moments that would otherwise be considered body horror in a more serious film, and there’s a little alien version of essentially a French bulldog that satisfies the cute factor.
The alien designs are rather familiar but appropriate for the world these characters inhabit. The film uses some of these alien designs for humor and utility, such as Eye-Ra’s spider-like climbing skills. Other aliens are homages to film noir characters. The Jabba-like crime lord Slugsy is clearly patterned after The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca actor Sydney Greenstreet while his little henchman looks and sounds just like Peter Lorre.
The aliens who inhabit Metropia also serve as the film’s metaphor for a world where segregation and xenophobia still exist but are applied to aliens instead of humans. Aliens do all the manual labor and are banned from entering certain human facilities (for example, aliens must go to their own hospitals). There were even more avenues Ray Gunn could’ve taken to explore these serious issues a bit deeper. Unfortunately, the most noteworthy discussion about how the film explores its metaphor for racism can’t be discussed here due to major spoilers, but it was something different than an animated movie has broached before and the film handles it thoughtfully.
Ray Gunn drags a bit in the middle as the story winds its ways through the requisite beats of a detective procedural, trying to misdirect the viewer on things and characters that seemed rather obvious all along. The film, especially during its homestretch, also packs in a lot of under-explored messaging about the entertainment industry, technology and human nature without delving deeply enough to explore any of those topics beyond the cursory.
On a technical level, Ray Gunn boasts a stellar retro-futuristic aesthetic across the board, from its architecture to its costumes and gizmos and vehicles. This is a beautiful looking and sounding film (one that was especially enjoyable in a Dolby theater, so it’s a shame that most people probably won’t discover Ray Gunn until it lands on Netflix).
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