It’s been over eight years since we last got a project involving Brad Bird in any major capacity – 2018’s Incredibles sequel – but it wasn’t until the opening titles started rolling for Ray Gunn (Bird’s latest film, a passion project decades in the making) that I realised how much I’d missed him in that time. His wizardry with worldbuilding, out-of-time sensibilities and style, and willingness to tell kids a more grown-up story than most of the homogenous ‘family film’ scene generally allows – all are alive and kicking in a sci-fi noir that’s part Metropolis, part The Big Sleep, part Star Wars, and 100% Bird.
Ray Gunn himself (voiced by Sam Rockwell) is a retro PI in a retro-futurist city, all flying cars and art deco and endless verticality, 700-storey skyscrapers towering above a ground level that is impressively rarely visited, Bird keeping his head in the clouds for a lot of this story. He’s pure archetype: ex-cop, too honest for his own good, and pathologically bad at making money, but his partner is a bit more out of this world. This is Eye-Ra (pronounced Ira and voiced by Tom Waits), one of many aliens in the glossy city of Metropia, with spindly legs for rapid climbing and an extendable single eye that doubles as a biological camera.
They’re a classic pairing, Eye-Ra endlessly frustrated at Ray’s goody-two-shoes antics but too fond of him to ever really push him into changing his ways. The duo finally get a chance at real cash when they’re offered a bodyguarding job by media mogul Barry Vogel (Alan Tudyk), keeping an eye on his most valuable but also unreliable asset, the ultra-glamorous, ultra-volatile singer Venus Nova (Scarlett Johansson). Of course, this doesn’t go smoothly, and it’s not long before Venus is implicated in a murder, gangsters are on Ray’s tail, and Ray is, of course, falling in love with this femme potentially-fatale.
Bird and co-writer Matthew Robbins have an infectious amount of fun playing with all the classic noir tropes and old sci-fi cliches and it’s a rollicking good time just speeding through the story alongside its very likeable characters, even if the ending goes out on a bit of a whimper. With 30-odd years of script development, you’d think Bird might have found a more comprehensive, less abrupt finale, but that doesn’t stop the first 100 minutes from being a real blast. You’ll probably be able to see where it’s going pretty early, but this is, ultimately, a film for kids, and it’s remarkably refreshing to have a family movie be so concerned with romance.
The Ray-Venus love story is wittily written, brilliantly voice acted by Rockwell and Johansson, and even sexy, a vanishingly rare quality in modern animation for any age group. A lot of this is down to Johansson’s purring performance, but there’s also a simply magical zero-gravity dance sequence that might just be the most romantic scene of the year, and Bird commits to this physical chemistry between his leads throughout.
As you might expect, Ray Gunn is expertly animated (though it’s a little sad that Bird wasn’t able to find anyone willing to fund his original dream of having the whole thing be hand-drawn). From the aforementioned flirty conversations that have Ray and Venus outright swanning around rooms to kinetic laser-blaster shootouts to flying car chases where you can practically feel the wind whip your air, Bird fills his frames with movement without ever getting too chaotic or hard to follow. Character designs are a lot of fun too, whether it’s one of the eminently punchable smarmy human elites bossing Ray around or the constantly glistening Jabba-esque mob boss slug voiced, naturally, by Matt Berry. Bird also gives himself a cameo as one of this slug’s trigger happy goons and, delightfully, it is just like Edna Mode managed to get to space.
As constantly referential to its inspirations as it is, Ray Gunn is never exactly groundbreaking, but family adventures made with as much skill and genuine passion as this are thin on the ground, so this is one to cherish. Outside of very little kids, there’s something for every other age group here; action, mystery, heart, and Scarlett Johansson singing bespoke space-age pop songs – who could say no to all of that?
