Brad Bird says he took his animated noir film Ray Gunn to Skydance Animation instead of Pixar because he wanted to make a movie for teenagers and adults, not children. The director, known for The Incredibles and Ratatouille, discussed the decision around Ray Gunn’s debut at the London Film Festival, according to Variety.
“There are 10 billion animated films for children and far fewer for teenagers and adults, despite them comprising the majority of the movie-going audience,” Bird said, per Variety. “Making animated films for them shouldn’t be a controversial decision, and yet it was always treated that way by the ministers of resource allocation at Pixar.”
Why Brad Bird Chose Skydance Over Pixar
Bird’s comments frame Ray Gunn as a direct response to what he sees as a gap in the animation market. For fans who grew up on his Pixar work, the choice signals that Ray Gunn will skew older in tone than films like Incredibles 2, even though Bird is returning to Pixar for a third Incredibles movie, according to Variety.
The move to Skydance also closes out a tangled production history for Ray Gunn. The project was originally developed at Turner Entertainment in the 1990s before being shelved after Turner merged with Time Warner, with Warner Bros. passing on it, Deadline reported. Bird used his own money to keep developing the idea while working on The Incredibles so he could retain creative control, according to Deadline.
“The terrible thing is that if they don’t make your film, they still own it,” Bird told Deadline. “You can’t take it somewhere else and get it made. Studios aren’t eager to see ideas they turned down become successes elsewhere, so they lock them down.” After AT&T’s acquisition of Warner Bros., the pandemic and other circumstances, Bird asked the studio to either make the film or give it back, and Warner Bros. returned it to him, Deadline reported.
The Case For Animation Aimed At Older Audiences
Bird has argued that animation as a medium remains boxed in by audience assumptions. “Animation still carries a lot of baggage,” he said, according to Deadline. His pitch for Ray Gunn rests on the idea that grown viewers make up most of the ticket-buying audience for movies generally, yet rarely get animated projects built with them in mind.
That philosophy shows up in the film’s themes. Ray Gunn explores art, technology and corporate greed inside a retro-futuristic city called Metropia, where humans and aliens coexist, following a private detective pulled into murder and deception, according to Variety and Deadline.
“The screenplay changed less than you’d think between that first draft and the finished movie,” Bird said, per Variety. “A lot of the things that people are saying that the film is dealing with that are contemporary right now in the headlines were in there 30 years ago. People are people and greed is greed and the flaws of people make good subject material for films.”
Bird also described how the story’s dystopian edge grew out of real-world observation rather than invention. “Technology was already starting to intrude into people’s personal lives, so it wasn’t crazy to imagine it intruding even more,” he told Deadline. He added that the plot itself came together organically: “Everything came from me asking questions and coming up with answers that entertained me,” he said.
Origin Of The Ray Gunn Concept
Bird has said the idea for Ray Gunn began with a song. Hearing The B-52s’ “Planet Claire,” he heard what struck him as a mash-up of the Peter Gunn theme and 1950s monster movie sound effects. “I went, ‘This is not Peter Gunn.’ What is this?'” Bird recalled, according to Variety.
“And then I went, ‘It’s Ray-Gun.’ And then I went, ‘Ray Gunn: It’s a guy’s name. He’s a detective, but it’s in the future.'”
On the 30-year gap between that idea and the finished film, Bird pushed back on the idea that he spent decades laboring over it. “I wish I could dress it up in some more reasonable-sounding way, but it actually took that long,” he told Deadline. “The mistake people make is saying that I worked on it for 30 years.
I didn’t. I gave it up and thought it would go the way a lot of ideas go, put on ice and never made. But this idea stayed with me.”
Cast, Crew And Release Details
Sam Rockwell voices Ray Gunn and Scarlett Johansson voices Venus Nova, Deadline reported. Michael Giacchino composed the score, marking his sixth collaboration with Bird since 2004, with a 74-piece orchestra recording the music at Abbey Road Studios in London, according to Variety.
Skydance Animation is producing the film, with John Lasseter, Bird, David Ellison, Dana Goldberg and Lisa Beroud serving as producers, Deadline reported. Ray Gunn marks Bird’s first feature since Incredibles 2.
Ray Gunn opens in theaters Dec. 4 and arrives on Netflix on Dec. 18, following its debut at the London Film Festival, according to Deadline.
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