We caught the first trailer for the upcoming Netflix animated film Ray Gunn in September and were charmed by director Brad Bird’s blend of a Jetsons-like future with classic 1930s noir detective thrillers. Bird has described it as a mashup of The Maltese Falcon and Buck Rogers , and the latest trailer definitely gives off that energy.
As previously reported , Bird has directed some of our all-time favorite animated films: The Iron Giant (1999), The Incredibles (2004), and Ratatouille (2007), with the latter two snagging well-deserved Oscar wins. He’s been kicking around the idea for Ray Gunn for the last 30 years, working on his many other film projects while the Ray Gunn script—co-written by Matthew Robbins, who also co-wrote 1987’s Batteries Not Included with Bird—“stayed in a filing cabinet at Warner Brothers,” the director said earlier this year.
The film’s inspiration came when Bird heard the opening of the B-52s’ “ Planet Claire ” (a personal favorite that also provides the soundtrack to the new trailer) and initially thought it was a cover of Henry Mancini’s theme music from the classic TV show Peter Gunn . Bird is a longtime fan of film noir and hard-boiled detectives, and he came up with the idea of a futuristic detective named Ray Gunn (a pun on “ raygun ,” of course). “It’s film noir and a hard-boiled detective story, but it’s got a lot more comedy and a lot more action than the average film noir,” said Bird .
