Brad Bird has directed some great movies over the last 30 years, including The Incredibles, The Iron Giant, and Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol. But Bird says over the last three decades, he’s been thinking about making something else — and now he finally got to create it, with Netflix backing the project.
It’s an animated movie called Ray Gunn. In a press release for the project, Bird describes it as “a blend of sci-fi and classic detective movies from the ’40s…it’s Maltese Falcon meets Buck Rogers.”
“I’ve been a fan of both of those sort of genres, and blending them together seemed fun, and a chance to play with a lot of very cinematic elements, and extreme characters,” Bird added.
The film will feature the voices of Sam Rockwell, Scarlett Johansson, and Tom Waits; Bird directed the project and co-wrote it script with Matthew Robbins.
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Ray Gunn will be Bird’s first work as a director since 2018’s Incredibles 2. (He executive produced and wrote, but did not direct, the upcoming Incredibles 3 for Pixar.)
Bird claims his ambitions with Ray Gunn are to target the “big chunk of people who don’t watch animation. That’s a group I’m anxious to persuade because it’s an amazing art form that is way too limited in people’s minds. Animation as a medium is too interesting to limit what kind of stories can be told.”
Here is Netflix’s official description of Ray Gunn.
In Metropia, a gigantic city in an alternate future as seen from 1939, private eye Raymond Gunn is drawn into a case involving aliens, murder and a multimedia star named Venus Nova.
Ray Gunn will premiere on Netflix later in 2026.
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