Brad Bird finally dragged himself back to animation, and the first look at Ray Gunn proves he hasn’t lost his touch for making robots and trench coats look impossibly cool. The image dropped this week, showing the titular detective in full noir regalia—think Raymond Chandler meets Blade Runner, but make it Pixar-adjacent and significantly less likely to make you question humanity’s future while staring at a rainy window and sighing.
Ray Gunn marks Bird’s return to stylized storytelling after years of superhero fatigue and Incredibles sequel obligations that probably paid for several houses but creatively satisfied nobody except merchandise executives. The project, which Netflix snatched up after a bidding war that reportedly involved actual tears and someone yelling “take my money” in a Santa Monica conference room, follows a private investigator navigating a retro-future metropolis where the robots wear better suits than you do and the neon signs actually mean something narrative-wise instead of just looking pretty.
The newly released still features our hero—literally named Ray Gunn, because subtlety died in the 1940s and nobody bothered to revive it—looming over a cityscape that screams “expensive” and “probably involves flying cars that we’ll see for three seconds before cutting to dialogue about betrayal.”
Bird has been teasing this since 2022, but now we have concrete visual proof that he’s not just doodling in his garage between meetings about Mission: Impossible stunts that Tom Cruise will actually attempt despite insurance liability nightmares. The director described the tone as “classical science fiction,” which is Hollywood code for “we spent an unholy amount of money on art direction and you’re going to appreciate every penny, peasant.”
The character design leans hard into deco-futurism, all sharp angles and fedoras that defy physics and probably took seventeen animators six months to perfect the brim tilt alone while their families forgot what they looked like.
What’s fascinating here is Bird’s commitment to original IP in an era where everything needs to be a prequel to a spin-off of a reboot of a show you watched while sick in 2003 and vaguely remember liking. Ray Gunn isn’t based on a comic book you sort of remember from 1987. It’s not a gritty reimagining of a cereal mascot with daddy issues and a drinking problem that the trailer will pretend is profound.
It’s just a cool-looking detective doing cool-looking things in a city that looks like what would happen if Art Deco had a baby with a Tesla coil and that baby grew up to be very into jazz and moral ambiguity. That shouldn’t feel revolutionary, but here we are, acting surprised that someone made something that doesn’t have the number “4” in the title or “Legacy” as a subtitle.
Netflix hasn’t confirmed a release date, because why would they commit to anything when they could just drop it randomly on a Tuesday at 3 AM and hope the algorithm notices before the Twitter discourse explodes into another culture war about animation styles? But sources suggest Ray Gunn is deep into production, with Bird insisting the film blends “old-school detective stories with things that explode in satisfying ways that practical effects nerds will screenshot immediately.”
Given his track record with The Iron Giant and The Incredibles, this might actually justify the streaming subscription you forgot to cancel three months ago while drunk. At minimum, it’ll give us something to watch that isn’t a true crime documentary about a guy who stole a submarine in 1974 and definitely did it while wearing a trench coat that wasn’t as cool as Ray Gunn’s.