Brad Bird’s Animated Retro Sci-Fi Noir

The alien designs are rather familiar but appropriate for the world these characters inhabit. The film uses some of these alien designs for humor and utility, such as Eye-Ra’s spider-like climbing skills. Other aliens are homages to film noir characters. The Jabba-like crime lord Slugsy is clearly patterned after The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca actor Sydney Greenstreet while his little henchman looks and sounds just like Peter Lorre.

The aliens who inhabit Metropia also serve as the film’s metaphor for a world where segregation and xenophobia still exist but are applied to aliens instead of humans. Aliens do all the manual labor and are banned from entering certain human facilities (for example, aliens must go to their own hospitals). There were even more avenues Ray Gunn could’ve taken to explore these serious issues a bit deeper. Unfortunately, the most noteworthy discussion about how the film explores its metaphor for racism can’t be discussed here due to major spoilers, but it was something different than an animated movie has broached before and the film handles it thoughtfully.

Ray Gunn drags a bit in the middle as the story winds its ways through the requisite beats of a detective procedural, trying to misdirect the viewer on things and characters that seemed rather obvious all along. The film, especially during its homestretch, also packs in a lot of under-explored messaging about the entertainment industry, technology and human nature without delving deeply enough to explore any of those topics beyond the cursory.

On a technical level, Ray Gunn boasts a stellar retro-futuristic aesthetic across the board, from its architecture to its costumes and gizmos and vehicles. This is a beautiful looking and sounding film (one that was especially enjoyable in a Dolby theater, so it’s a shame that most people probably won’t discover Ray Gunn until it lands on Netflix).

Ray Gunn: Brad Bird’s Next Animated Film

Composer Michael Giacchino’s moody score sounds exactly like one you’d hear in a 1940s movie, especially during more dialogue-driven or romantic scenes. All of the creative elements make Ray Gunn pulpy fun with an old-school sci-fi gloss.

The voice cast are uniformly solid across the board, with Rockwell leading the pack as the hardboiled but glib gumshoe who somehow holds on to his optimism. The cynicism that’s inherent in film noir is provided here by Eye-Ra, who Waits plays with just the right mix of world-weariness and wry wit. Matt Berry is suitably erudite but sleazy as the voice of Slugsy, while Bobby Canavale, Alan Tudyk, Michelle Rodriguez and Kether Donohue all get their respective moments to shine in supporting roles.

And it should come as no surprise that Scarlett Johansson lends a breathy sultriness to the film’s femme fatale Venus Nova, but what might surprise you is how fine of a singer she is. Composer Kimbra provides three songs for the film that Johansson performs, with “Innocent” being the biggest earworm of the group.