Brad Bird Takes Animation Into the Shadows With New “Ray Gunn” Trailer

There is something almost magical about animation.

Give an artist a blank page and suddenly there are no real limits to where a story can go, what a world can look like or even what kind of story has to be told.

Yet, despite everything the medium is capable of achieving, animation can sometimes find itself placed inside a surprisingly small box.

Brad Bird has never been particularly interested in staying inside it.

Netflix has released the new trailer for “Ray Gunn,” Bird’s upcoming animated sci-fi noir starring Sam Rockwell and Scarlett Johansson. And if you were expecting the director behind “The Incredibles” and “Ratatouille” to return with another familiar animated adventure, one look at Metropia should make it clear that Bird has something considerably different in mind.

Welcome to the future. Just don’t expect it to be particularly clean.

“Ray Gunn” takes audiences into Metropia, a spectacular retrofuturistic city where humans and aliens live alongside one another, flying cars race between skyscrapers and buildings stretch a mile into the sky. With its streamlined architecture and Art Deco influences, there is an immediate beauty to the world Bird and his team have created.

Look a little closer, however, and those bright lights cast some very long shadows.

Murder and corruption exist beneath Metropia’s polished future, and Raymond Gunn isn’t exactly the shining hero coming to clean everything up. Voiced by Rockwell, Ray is a hardboiled detective who already seems outdated by the world surrounding him. Technology has reached the point where tiny “pry bots” can perform much of a private detective’s investigative work, leaving Ray and his cyclopean alien partner Eye-Ra, voiced by Tom Waits, among the few investigators still doing things the old-fashioned way.

Then Scarlett Johansson’s Venus Nova walks into his life.

One of Metropia’s biggest and most controversial stars, Venus brings plenty of scandal along with her. Ray soon finds himself investigating the people surrounding the troubled celebrity, pulling him between the glittering heights of Metropia and the considerably darker world hiding underneath them.

If all of that sounds less like what audiences have come to expect from a large-scale animated feature and more like a classic detective film that somehow crashed into a science-fiction epic, that is precisely the point.

Bird first conceived “Ray Gunn” near the beginning of his career, describing its original idea as “The Maltese Falcon” meeting “Buck Rogers.” The filmmaker drew inspiration from the Bogart detective films he grew up watching, along with noir classics including “Out of the Past” and the worlds inhabited by detectives such as Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade.

Decades later, animation finally gets to take that trip with him.

And perhaps that is the most exciting thing about “Ray Gunn.” It isn’t simply borrowing the visual language of noir for an animated movie. Bird appears to be using animation to fully embrace everything that makes those stories work—the shadows, morally complicated characters, glamorous surfaces hiding something considerably uglier and a detective stubbornly trying to navigate a world that may already have moved beyond him—while placing all of it somewhere live action could never quite create in the same way.

That collision of genres also makes Metropia particularly fascinating. This is a future filled with technological wonders, aliens and impossible architecture, yet its central character belongs to a profession already being replaced by machines. For all the advancements surrounding Ray, some very old problems—greed, corruption, celebrity and murder—apparently survived the journey into the future just fine.

Maybe humanity really is consistent.

But there is something else “Ray Gunn” could help remind audiences of when it arrives later this year: animation isn’t a genre.

It is a medium.

It can give us talking animals, fairy tales and superheroes. It can also give us hardboiled detectives, murder mysteries, morally complicated movie stars, smoky shadows and mile-high cities populated by humans and aliens. As Bird himself puts it, animation is simply too fun and too interesting to limit the kinds of stories that can be told through it.

“Ray Gunn” certainly seems ready to test those limits.

The film arrives in select theaters and limited 70mm on December 4 before streaming on Netflix beginning December 18.

The future of Metropia may look incredibly bright.

Just be careful what you find lurking in its shadows.