Netflix has released the first trailer for Brad Bird Ray Gunngiving audiences their first extended look at the director’s long-running animated detective story and one of the most anticipated animated films of the year.
The Skydance Animation film will be released in select theaters on December 4, including a limited number of 70mm screenings, before arriving on Netflix on December 18.
The trailer arrives as Bird heads to the Ottawa International Animation Festival, where cartoon beer will moderate a Q&A with the filmmaker alongside Cinesite visual effects supervisor Adel Abada, Cinesite head of character animation Jason Ryan, and Skydance Animation costume designer Neysa Bové on Saturday about the film.
Set in Metropia, a sprawling city imagined as what the future might have been like in 1939, the film follows private detective Raymond Gunn (Sam Rockwell) on a case involving aliens, murder, and multimedia star Venus Nova (Scarlett Johansson). Tom Waits voices Eyera, a one-eyed alien and Ray’s closest confidant. Bird described the film in Annecy as “Buck Rogers meets The Maltese Falcon,” a combination that runs through its imposing Art Deco cityscape and harsh mystery.
Netflix has also announced the rest of the voice cast: Alan Tudyk, Matt Berry, Bobby Cannavale, Michael Chernus, Kether Donohue, Michelle Rodriguez, Aasif Mandvi, Matt Jones, Kathryn Hunter, John Ratzenberger, Justin Peck and Patton Oswalt. The ad does not identify its characters.
Bird wrote the screenplay with Matthew Robbins, based on their own original story. Michael Giacchino composed the music, while Paul Felix serves as production designer, Wendell Luebbe as art director and Neysa Bove as costume designer.
Ray Gunn It has been in Bird’s imagination for more than three decades, although, as he explained in Annecy, he spent much of that time dormant. Festival audiences saw the first seven minutes of the film in June; Today’s trailer brings that world to a wider audience ahead of its December release.