BFI London Review: Ray Gunn Finds Brad Bird Back In Inventive, Joyous Form

The family-friendly noir pastiche is now just as much of a throwback as Who Framed Roger Rabbit? was to the genre’s old Hollywood heyday, and the spirit of Robert Zemeckis’ madcap riff on that hard-boiled style is alive and well in the year’s best animated films. First there was Coyote vs. Acme, the Looney Tunes legal conspiracy thriller that bore more similarities to the Zemeckis classic than simply featuring a roll call of cartoon icons, updating its mystery narrative with a darker satirical bent against late-capitalist America that ensured it couldn’t be seen as a cozy echo of an earlier canonized blockbuster. Now we have Brad Bird’s decades-in-the-making passion project Ray Gunn, a private-detective adventure set in a retrofuturistic metropolis where humans and aliens co-exist, flying cars and Blade Runner-style holograms sit alongside Art Deco skyscrapers, and a stinging rebuke of our current age of tech hides in plain sight.

After the big-budget whiff of Tomorrowland and hugely successful but underwhelming Incredibles sequel, Bird’s latest is a return to the inventive, hilarious form of his first three animated efforts, albeit with some distracting narrative decisions along the way that undermine the intelligence of his family audience. For example: it takes an hour to reveal one character has a dual identity, which anybody can immediately work out from the famous, distinct voice two characters share, but is staged as something of a grand reveal. The film doesn’t have the number of twists and double-crosses the most stereotypical noir would, and that’s the most glaring of several plot beats that feel like an unwarranted concession to the genre’s reliance on shocks and rug pulls.

With that one quibble noted, Bird and co-screenwriter Matthew Robbins––a veteran collaborator of Steven Spielberg––have otherwise crafted an impeccable script, the kind where every small world-building detail they introduce pays off by the finale, with the relentless, chaotic energy of the story hiding just how neatly, meticulously constructed it all is. Sam Rockwell voices the titular private detective, one of the least-grizzled gumshoes to ever appear onscreen; he’s racked with debts so can’t pay his only employee (the alien Eyera, voiced by Tom Waits), but has an aversion to playing dirty to make those ends meet. He hates violence, and will return any cash he makes if he discovers he was hired for a sinister motive. Most movie PIs are haunted by their troubled past; he seems overly cautious to avoid making any trouble for himself to start with. It’s an effective, against-type use of Rockwell, allowing him the rare chance to excel as the straight man in a filmography where his best-known roles are violent, eccentric, or both.

Ray and Eyera get their most high-profile gig yet when hired by Arnold (Bobby Cannavale), the fourth husband of pop superstar Venus Nova (Scarlett Johansson), who is worried that she’s having an affair. The pair soon discover it was all a ruse so he had a reason to divorce her on the eve of a new album tracking to flop; this puts them in touch with her manager Barry Vogel (Alan Tudyk), who hires them with the simple assignment of watching over the star for the rest of her release week. She’s a high-tempered tabloid fixture with a tendency to overshadow her album rollouts with relationship breakdowns and self-inflicted controversy. All they need to do is ensure she remains safe and out of the spotlight for another day. Unfortunately, they soon discover she’s being blackmailed over a potentially career-ruining secret by a kingpin in the alien underworld (Matt Berry), and various people from her personal life start winding up dead: staying out of trouble stops being an available option.

Although he’s rebuked the criticism several times, there is ammunition within Ray Gunn for anybody looking for further evidence Bird shares the objectivist sympathies of Ayn Rand. This time, however, the director seems conscious of this, and Nova’s character arc appears to be in direct conversation with this very idea; she’s a superstar with a very distinct persona, yet her fame has hidden her “true voice” from the public, her art all compromised and impersonal. Bird’s prior movies have focused on characters forced to hide their identities to conform, but the arguments they shared were considered Randian because their talents were for society’s greater good, and that they were held back from utilizing them. 

Nova, on the other hand, already has a platform she doesn’t want if it means maintaining a lack of authenticity, which complicates the idea that Bird is singularly fixated on protagonists who are held back by ungrateful bureaucracy and creates a fascinating tension. The movie doesn’t fully rebuke the criticisms of this storytelling preoccupation, but does succeed in complicating them, which adds greater intrigue to an adventure that’s already plenty of fun on its surface. 

It’s further complicated by how this clashes with timely themes designed as overt allegories for our current world of tech intrusion, with later stages of the movie presenting ideas of a surveillance state being weaponized for marketing, and the replacement of artists with AI—all of which are natural to criticize, yet when contextualized in this director’s work, criticizing them starts to line up comfortably with the broadest Randian sympathies. Think real human artists should be elevated instead of computer-programmed mediocrity, and you should be able to live free of constant oversight from devices that monitor your every conversation? Of course you do, and Bird subtly twists the knife on his critics by introducing perhaps the only progressive ideas that align with the author’s worldview into the core of his story. The movie ending with a “Produced by David Ellison” credit does, admittedly, make it a little harder to give him the benefit of the doubt on the movie’s political leanings, but we may have to start getting used to overlooking that insidious billionaire’s involvement in many great films for years to come.

The fact that a throwback adventure like Ray Gunn can inspire this level of internal debate should hopefully convince you that this is Bird back at his best, with rich and thorny ideas hidden beneath a joyously crowd-pleasing adventure. Any debate it causes will struggle to overshadow just how much fun it is.

Ray Gunn premiered at the 2026 BFI London Film Festival and will open in theaters on December 4 and arrive on Netflix on December 18.