It’s hard to imagine an animation director more likely to chafe at the restrictions of the big-studio system then Brad Bird.
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It → ’ → Bird
(Or at least, hard to imagine an American animation director; animators from some other more animation-forward countries might be plenty chafed, or possibly just stare at their kid-friendly counterparts with bafflement.)
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animators → imagine → bafflement
It’s not that Bird has said so much as a word against his longtime bosses and collaborators at Disney or Pixar, where he made The Incredibles and its sequel and took over/saved Ratatouille, resulting in multiple animated classics.
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he → ’ → classics
It’s not even that Bird’s movies push Disney-level content restrictions to the brink of studio acceptance.
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movies → ’ → acceptance
But the movies Bird has made are often about exceptional individuals who, well, chafe at the restrictions applied to them, whether by small-minded institutions, individuals, or society at large.
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who → make → institutions
So it makes sense that Bird would get in on the streaming-era tendency for deep-pocketed companies to hand major directors substantial sums of money to make their dream project.
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companies → make → project
In Bird’s case, that project — at least in animation; his earthquake epic 1918 remains as yet unmade — is Ray Gunn, a sci-fi noir that premiered at the London Film Festival this weekend ahead of a short theatrical release and a Netflix debut in December.
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that → remain → December
The funny thing is, Ray Gunn is entirely consistent with Bird’s other animated movies.
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Gunn → animate → movies
He’s not, by nature, one of those guys who wants to see way bloodier, way sexier American cartoons.
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who → ’ → cartoons
(Or if he does, he doesn’t seem to harbor much ambition to make them himself.)
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he → do → them
The new movie is a little harder-edged than a Pixar movie, sure; there’s no kid hero for younger audiences to latch onto, the way they might have for the Incredible siblings or The Iron Giant’s Hogarth, and yes, like any noir worth its salt, the plot involves some murder.
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plot → ’ → murder
But any kid who has enjoyed Who Framed Roger Rabbit or any given Star Wars movie should be able to roll with it.
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Who → enjoy → it
It may even, like Roger Rabbit, turn some kids into lifelong noir fans.
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It → turn → fans
This, despite the fact that during Ray Gunn, it’s easy to suspect that Bird likes noir more for its retro qualities than its exploration of humanity’s shadowy depths.
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Bird → ’ → depths
The title character, voiced by Sam Rockwell, is a private detective in a retro-futuristic world — jetpacks and hologram ads but also black-and-white television, like Blade Runner meets TaleSpin — and he’s not one of those noir heroes who hides some bottom-line decency beneath a hard-boiled or wisecracking façade.
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who → voice → façade
There’s a little wisecracking; how could there not be, with Sam Rockwell playing a P.I.?
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Rockwell → ’ → P.I.
But despite his dwindling finances, Gunn doesn’t come across as laid particularly low, and his decency sits pretty close to the surface.
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decency → dwindle → surface
His alien partner Eyera (Tom Waits) carps a little more about money and negotiable ethics, but he’s ultimately similarly upright and loyal.
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he → carp → money
Their money situation seems to turn around when Arnold Dom (Bobby Cannavale) hires Gunn to spy on his ultra-famous wife, the pop star Venus Nova (Scarlett Johansson), who’s known in the media for her mercurial temper.
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who → seem → temper
The job itself seems pretty open-and-shut, but in proper noir fashion it draws Gunn into a wider world of intrigue, deception, criminals… the usual stuff.
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it → seem → intrigue
Bird and his animators have imagined a gleaming world of towering skyscrapers, flying cars, malfunctioning weaponry, aliens living among humans but treated as second-class citizens, and all manner of eye-filling wizardry.
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Bird → imagine → wizardry
And it’s not just the what of the movie’s look, but the how; Bird is even more of a wizard at choreographing action, as he proved not just in his animated movies but his top-tier Mission: Impossible outing.
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he → ’ → movies
Ray Gunn isn’t nearly as set-piece-heavy as that movie, or an Incredibles installment; instead, shorter skirmishes or slapstick mishaps or brief pursuits feel like set pieces based sheerly on construction, and how Bird carries visual momentum from one motion to the next.
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Bird → feel → next
(It’s clearer than ever that if anyone should have taken over Indiana Jones from Spielberg, it should have been him.)
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it → ’ → Spielberg
All of this makes Ray Gunn enormously fun to watch, and to listen to.
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Gunn → make → this
The visual and audio elements only come into conflict when Bird accidentally finds the trouble with hiring actors as vocally distinctive as Rockwell and Johansson.
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Bird → come → Rockwell
Hearing both of them, especially as leads, can put the actors’ real-life looks in competition with their animated counterparts.
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Hearing → hear → counterparts
Here, the nearly square-jawed Gunn looks a little bland compared to the raffishness of Rockwell IRL, and as gorgeously animated as Venus is, especially as we learn more about the malleability of her image, she’s a little more Generic Animated Babe than the iconic Johansson, though her vocal dexterity is used to its full advantage.
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dexterity → look → advantage
(She does all her own singing, to boot.)
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She → do → singing
For that matter, while Eyera is a joy to behold in skittery, bug-like motion, his actual design looks pretty slick for an alien voiced with gravelly charm by Tom Waits.
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design → behold → Waits
The presence of aliens in this world might feel like one sci-fi step too far — it takes it from alternate future to flat-out fantasy — but those characters are used for a strain of inclusivity, with the aliens clearly discriminated against unfairly, that overpowers Bird’s vaguely Randian leanings.
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that → feel → leanings
His old-school-achiever concerns emerge more when addressing the career of Venus Nova, which pits mass-appeal pop against more “honest” (which, wouldn’t you know it, also sounds more old-fashioned) songwriting that her handlers are afraid will alienate her massive fandom.
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handlers → emerge → fandom
It may not be particularly wise about the creation of pop music (though there is a twist that is pretty clever about the creation of modern pop-music imagery and legacy), but those moments feel like Bird parsing the difference between his slightly edgy animated dream project and the compromises demanded even by his allies.
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Bird → be → allies
Yet there’s no escaping some compromise or another, as he probably knows, especially in a world (on and off screen) so infatuated with digital fakeness.
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he → escape → fakeness
Bird originally wanted to do Ray Gunn in classic hand-drawn animation, and there are moments where the gee-whiz smoothness of his big-budget CG feels at odds with the pretense that his a noirish mystery.
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his → want → pretense
He’s a child of Tomorrowland through and through, which makes it all the more baffling that no one at Disney or Pixar ever wanted to spot him the cash to make what is ultimately a close-to-all-ages sci-fi thriller with a few lovely romantic grace notes.
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what → ’ → notes
They let him make the actual Tomorrowland movie, a far stranger and less appealing enterprise than this piece of pop entertainment.
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him → let → entertainment
Which company actually puts up the money is immaterial, of course, except that Ray Gunn very much deserves to be seen on a big screen — that’s how I saw it, and it plays great both on a big canvas and in front of a big crowd — and Netflix mostly only affords that as a vanity sideshow.
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Netflix → put → sideshow
(There are 70mm prints being struck, so New York City or Los Angeles residents especially should have a shot at seeing it in an ultra-analog format.)
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residents → be → format
It’s that extratextual knowledge that adds a little bittersweet oomph to the film’s satisfying ending; yes, a streamer took a chance on this not-especially-risky crowdpleaser for now, but what’s the move for his next one?
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move → ’ → one
…and 2 more, not listed.
The Aporia
