Ray Gunn Review: Brad Bird Finally Made the Grown-Up Pixar Movie of His Dreams

Director Brad Bird has spent nearly his entire career begging American moviegoers to understand that Not all animated movies are for kids. “It is NOT a genre,” he said in 2004, repeating himself, “it is an art form that can do ANY genre.” For almost as long as he has wanted Hollywood to catch up to Japan, France, and the rest of the world in appreciating animated art, he has worked on Ray Gunn. He scripted this retrofuturist murder mystery before directing his debut feature, 1999’s The Iron Giant.

In 2026, Ray Gunn is finally a real movie. It operates as a meta-polemic echoing every argument Bird has ever made for what animation can achieve for adults. Reunited with his old colleague John Lasseter under the Skydance Animation banner, Bird has realized his lifelong dream of sending detective Ray Gunn, played by Sam Rockwell, on a hoverbike-driven investigation bursting with art deco megastructures and laser-beam shootouts. Older kids might enjoy what Bird has cooked up, provided they also love Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place or Robert Aldrich’s The Big Knife. Bird does not pander to the under-10 cartoon demographic. He has made exactly the movie he set out to make: a stunning, overstuffed sci-fi noir.

Skydance spared no expense in matching the technical wizardry of Bird’s Pixar films, The Incredibles and Ratatouille. The result looks like concept art brought to life. Ray and his wisecracking, one-eyed alien partner Eye-Ra, voiced by Tom Waits, zip around a sprawling retrofuture city to uncover the truth behind a murder tied to glamorous diva Venus Nova, played by Scarlett Johansson. Every inch of the metropolis feels inhabited, from towering architecture to the uneasy coexistence of human and extraterrestrial citizens. Bird explores weighty themes including racial tensions, technology encroaching on art, artificial intelligence erasing human creativity, and an economy where corporations act like criminals while private eyes struggle to make rent.

Bird cannot balance every idea crammed into Ray Gunn, and none cuts as deep as the post-war paranoia of The Iron Giant or the ode to artistic expression in Ratatouille. Moment to moment, however, it hardly matters. The movie is a visual feast, with every frame as dense with production design and jokes as Bird’s best Simpsons episodes. Futuristic art deco landscapes and intricate, single-shot rumbles punctuate Ray’s gumshoe work. Bird’s eye for composition and movement remains sharp, and the decades he spent imagining this world make him eager to show it all off.

Ray Gunn feels remarkably mature. Rockwell slings wisecracks reminiscent of Humphrey Bogart, but Ray’s pursuit of answers leaves him as battered as if he were hunting for the Maltese Falcon. Michael Giacchino’s score underscores that this is not a parody or pastiche, but the continuation of a legacy.

Bird generates plenty of laughs by smashing 1930s detective tropes against laser guns and alien antics. Waits portrays the wall-crawling Eye-Ra, whose monocular anatomy functions as a walking spy camera for Ray. The gravelly timbre of the singer-actor makes him the most grounded and sensible character in the picture, despite being a lanky green sleuth constantly on the edge of one last job. Matthew Berry voices the slimy mob boss Slugsy, who would fit right in with the cast of The Big Combo.

Bird nails the physical comedy. A shakedown involving two of Slugsy’s extraterrestrial heavies—including the second animated riff on Peter Lorre seen this year—builds until everyone’s bodies meld together via a molecule-scrambling pistol. The shootout rolls from hallways to turbo-elevators, playing like a Bugs Bunny cartoon colliding with a Dana Andrews brawl. The gags in Ray Gunn are silly, but Bird never sacrifices a sense of danger.

Ray Gunn is also a deeply romantic movie. As Ray investigates Venus Nova’s connection to the central murder, he falls for her hard, aided by Johansson delivering a flirtatious, femme-fatale voice performance. Beneath the hard-boiled cynicism, Bird maintains a soft spot for characters letting their guards down. In a zero-gravity sequence, Ray and Venus dance away their hardened exteriors and melt into each other’s eyes. Bird makes a weightless embrace feel monumental.

Stunning, snappy, and mannered like a nonexistent live-action counterpart from the 1950s, Ray Gunn delivers. After more than 30 years of false starts—navigating Pixar triumphs, live-action detours with Tom Cruise and George Clooney, and an industry that struggled to categorize his vision—Bird finally got his shot, and he does not flinch. This is a sophisticated animated adventure comedy for adults, a type of film that rarely exists in mainstream Western animation. The movie proves his point.

It is a shame that this big-screen spectacle will play on so few big screens. Viewers should dim the lights when catching it at home. Ray Gunn stands as one of the year’s best action movies, sci-fi thrillers, comedies, and romances combined.