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Brad Bird’s ‘Ray Gunn’ Gets First Trailer, 70mm Theatrical Release, Expanded Voice Cast
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Netflix has released the first trailer for Brad Bird’s Ray Gunn, giving the public its first extended look at the director’s long-gestating animated detective story and one of the year’s most anticipated animated features.
The Skydance Animation film will open in select theaters on December 4, including a limited number of 70mm screenings, before arriving on Netflix December 18.
The trailer arrives as Bird heads to the Ottawa International Animation Festival, where Cartoon Brew will moderate a Q&A with the filmmaker alongside Cinesite vfx supervisor Adel Abada, Cinesite head of character animation Jason Ryan, and Skydance Animation costume designer Neysa Bové on Saturday about the film.
Set in Metropia, a sprawling city imagined as the future might have looked in 1939, the film follows private eye Raymond Gunn (Sam Rockwell) into a case involving aliens, murder, and multimedia star Venus Nova (Scarlett Johansson). Tom Waits voices Eyera, a one-eyed alien and Ray’s closest confidant. Bird described the film at Annecy as “Buck Rogers meets The Maltese Falcon,” a combination that runs through its towering Art Deco cityscape and hard-boiled mystery.
Netflix has also announced the rest of the voice cast: Alan Tudyk, Matt Berry, Bobby Cannavale, Michael Chernus, Kether Donohue, Michelle Rodriguez, Aasif Mandvi, Matt Jones, Kathryn Hunter, John Ratzenberger, Justin Peck, and Patton Oswalt. The announcement does not identify their characters.
Bird wrote the screenplay with Matthew Robbins, based on his own original story. Michael Giacchino composed the score, while Paul Felix serves as production designer, Wendell Luebbe as art director, and Neysa Bove as costume designer.
Ray Gunn has been in Bird’s imagination for more than three decades, though, as he explained at Annecy, it spent much of that time dormant. Festival audiences saw the film’s opening seven minutes in June; today’s trailer brings that world to a wider audience ahead of its December release.
