OTTAWA, Canada – Brad Bird has spent the better part of three decades trying to get Ray Gunn made. On Saturday at the Ottawa International Animation Festival, he and several of the artists who ultimately helped him make it offered one of the most detailed looks yet at how the long-gestating noir sci-fi came together.
Now, the film will arrive in select theaters on December 4, including limited 70mm screenings, before arriving on Netflix on December 18.
cartoon beer moderated the OIAF presentation, which featured Bird alongside Cinesite visual effects supervisor Adel Abada, Skydance Animation costume designer Neysa Bové and Cinesite head of character animation Jason Ryan.
The group analyzed the film’s cinematography, imposing futuristic city, elaborate costumes, action-packed chase scenes, and character animation, using the first seven minutes of the finished film along with work-in-progress footage to demonstrate how those elements evolved throughout production.
Animated at Skydance Animation and Cinesite, Ray Gunn takes place in Metropia, a gigantic city conceived as the future might have been imagined in 1939. Private detective Raymond Gunn (Sam Rockwell) tangles with troubled celebrity Venus Nova (Scarlett Johansson) in a story that blends classic detective fiction with retro sci-fi.
“The basic idea is that it is the future, but the future as seen since 1939,” Bird explained.
Filmed as a live action noir
For Abada and the cinematography team, that meant resisting some of the conventions that have developed around computer-generated animation.
An important change was to combine the design and lighting much earlier than usual. Instead of setting up cameras before turning scenes over to lighting, the departments worked simultaneously so Bird could make decisions more like a director standing on a physical set.
“Our approach was: we’re making a movie, we’re making a movie,” Abada said. “Let’s use the language that cinematography has completely given us.”
Roman Polanski’s Chinatown was the main touchstone, particularly in establishing a lens package for the film. Bird frequently pushed the team toward a 28mm lens, Abada recalled, even though such wide lenses can distort animated characters.
Bird added another somewhat unexpected influence: 70mm photography.
“Most detective movies are shot in old, spherical format at 1.33,” he said. “So my inspiration was also 70 millimeters, which is a widescreen aspect ratio, but spherical lenses.”
The team studied the work of cinematographer Conrad Hall and other live-action references while adopting a simple rule: “Don’t be afraid of the shadow.”
“If a character stays in the shadows, then he stays in the shadows,” Abada said. “Lighting is not beauty; it is a storytelling tool like animation.”
Bird also pointed out a less obvious technique associated with John Huston’s technique. The maltese falcon: showing ceilings. They were often absent from the Hollywood sets of the time; It was cheaper to simply fabricate walls, but Huston used them to create spectacular low-angle compositions.
“We did that more in this movie,” Bird said. “It also makes people look big, which is great.”
Metropia a mile high
The scale of the film presented a different challenge.
According to Abada, Ray Gunn It was produced in approximately 18 months and contains around 1,800 shots spread over 35 sequences. Eight sequences take place outdoors, and about half of them are chases through a city designed to rise a mile into the air.
The filmmakers deliberately tackled one of their most difficult sequences almost immediately.
An approximately 65-second vertical chase contained 35 shots and involved night lighting, freshly fallen rain, building interiors visible through windows, character effects, hair, destruction, and other effects.
“We consider it a very challenging sequence to build the set and environment, but it involves everyone throughout the process, from assets to lighting,” Abada explained.
Ending it early gave the team something more valuable than a full scene: proof that their approach could work.
“That allowed us to build confidence in showing what Metropia would be like,” he said, particularly before tackling even larger sequences containing more than 110 shots at dusk or in broad daylight, where the city would have nowhere to hide.
Dressing the future of 1939
Bové faced a similar problem in costume design. Ray Gunn He couldn’t just dress his characters in period clothing.
“This was the most complex film I’ve worked on in my career,” he said. “We’re not going to make a documentary about the 1940s. So how can we make a futuristic version of 1940s costumes?”
Their solution was to mix early 1940s silhouettes with Streamline Moderne technology. Vintage radios became an especially useful reference, from their Bakelite surfaces to the speaker grill fabrics that could be reinterpreted as ties and suits.
No character gave Bové more room to experiment than Venus Nova, who has more than 23 costumes in the film.
Bové studied stars such as Lauren Bacall, Jane Russell, Rita Hayworth and Marilyn Monroe, observing their glamorous on-screen outfits and the difference between what they wore on screen and what they might wear off stage.
For a musical number, Venus transforms in an instant from angel to demon. But Bird insisted that the transformation had to be achievable through technology and couldn’t seem like magic.
“We wanted to make sure it didn’t look magical, that it looked like something technological,” he said.
Even the Venus halo followed that rule. A circular apparatus on the back of its head can be read as a halo in one configuration and then mechanically form devil horns in another. Bové said the team figured out how to build the propeller, right down to its transparent tubes, lights and electronics.
The same thought went into Venus’ entire wardrobe, including the transforming dress. Bové found actual display modules small enough to resemble sequins, providing a plausible technological explanation for the animated flames moving across the costume.
“Everything these costumes imply is reality and based on reality,” he said. The costume packages became so detailed, he added, that “you could easily hand them off to a tailor and they could build them too.”
40s acting in CG
Meanwhile, Ryan faced the challenge of translating the influence of the era into movement and performance.
The veteran animator said the team studied classic film actors, including Humphrey Bogart, to understand how actors of the era behaved and posed.
“Sometimes it means a very, very restrained caricature and making it small to really see the expressions.”
Ryan showed the audience his progression in the film’s seven-minute opening sequence, which had been shared with the Ottawa audience, beginning with an extremely crude blocking derived from the storyboards. Those forums were unusually specific; Abada estimated that approximately 90% of what appears in the film was already present in storyboards created two years earlier.
Instead of immediately polishing a performance, Ryan first used simple shapes and poses to establish what he called the “goal posts” of each shot. Only after the pivotal action was performed did the team begin layering clothing, effects, secondary movements, and other details.
But Bird was also keen to move computer-generated animation away from physical realism.
In a reaction shot, Ryan wanted Ray to do a dramatically exaggerated shot, which elicited one of the biggest laughs of the day from the OIAF crowd. The pose was not universally popular in the studio, but Bird supported it. “Brad fought for it,” Ryan recalled as the director nodded and smiled in agreement.
The sequence also demonstrates how traditional animation techniques survived within the film’s CG process. Ryan talked about adding blurred frames and exaggerated impacts, while a 2D animator was brought in to design the flames on Venus’ dress over CG blocking.
“It gave it that nice handmade feel,” Ryan explained.
The itchy bird couldn’t scratch itself
During an audience question-and-answer session after the presentation, Bird also offered additional context on why Ray Gunn it remained with him long after its original development in the 1990s.
Before Ray Gunnhad attempted to make an animated film based on the Will Eisner film. The spirit. Bird said the team even had star wars and The empire strikes back Producer Gary Kurtz was involved, but couldn’t convince anyone to finance that type of animated film.
“No one was willing to see those types of animated films,” he recalled. “So it was an itch that wasn’t scratched.”
Ray Gunn offered another route into similar territory.
“I really liked the idea,” Bird said. “Every time I thought about it, [it] It made me want to do it.”
When the original version failed to advance, Bird said, it disappeared into storage “like the cinematic equivalent of the end of Raiders of the lost ark.”
Surprisingly, despite 30 years in lockdown, Bird said the basic story has changed relatively little since then.
“You discover better ways of doing things,” he explained. “You figure out how to take this idea here and make it support some other idea down there… but the story is the story, and that’s why I wanted to make it.”
The journey of decades also connects Ray Gunn to a broader ambition that has run through Bird’s animated films.
Bird said he deliberately never pitched the film to Pixar because he wanted to target a slightly older audience. “If you’re a teenager, I think you’ll like it,” he said, “but it’s not for five-year-olds.”
And when an audience member asked if Ray Gunn represented the culmination of his career, Bird quickly backed away.
“I hope not,” he joked. “I hope to finish later.” Another big laugh.
Instead, he placed the film on a continuum reaching back to his previous works.
“With each film, I try to push the medium to be more mainstream and less aimed at kids,” Bird said. “I’m not against children. I love them. But when I was a child, I hated being talked down to. [to].”
He remembered being taken to movies like Doctor Zhivago when I was a child and didn’t fully understand what I was seeing.
“I would have questions. You were reaching out. And I liked that.”
That philosophy, Bird suggested, was already present in The iron giantseemingly the comfortable, familiar story of a boy and a robot, but one that begins with Sputnik and embeds its story in the anxieties of the Cold War.
With Ray Gunnis moving in the same direction.
“I’m trying to get a little more toward a mainstream movie audience,” Bird said, “and less toward the kids’ table.”