Brad Bird has been carrying Ray Gunn around in his head since 1996. That is thirty years. Before The Iron Giant, before The Incredibles, before Ratatouille. Most filmmakers would have let go of it a long time ago, moved on to something more practical. Bird held on, and now Netflix is finally unveiling it at Annecy this week.
The setup is genuinely interesting. Ray Gunn is a noir set in a city called Metropia, a place where humans and aliens coexist, all filtered through the visual aesthetic of 1939. Think fedoras and neon signs but with creatures from another galaxy walking the streets. Sam Rockwell plays the last human private detective in the city, which is exactly the kind of role Rockwell was born to inhabit. The man has built a career on characters who are a little too smart for their own good, a little too stubborn to quit. This feels tailor made for him.
The cast around him is stacked. Scarlett Johansson is involved, and Tom Waits is in there too, which is one of those casting choices that immediately tells you the movie has taste. Michael Giacchino is scoring it, and his work with Bird on The Incredibles remains some of the best composer/director partnerships in modern animation.
What makes this project worth paying attention to is not just the talent involved. It is the fact that Bird conceived of it three decades ago and never stopped refining it. That kind of patience is almost unheard of in Hollywood. Most passion projects either get rushed into production before they are ready or die quietly in development. Bird somehow avoided both outcomes. He kept working, kept directing other movies, and kept returning to Ray Gunn until the timing was right.
If you want to understand what kind of filmmaker Brad Bird is, go back and watch The Iron Giant before Ray Gunn arrives. That movie was a commercial failure when it came out in 1999, and Bird spent years watching it slowly find its audience. He knows what it feels like to wait for people to catch up. Ray Gunn feels like the ultimate expression of that patience, a movie that has been living in one man's imagination for longer than most careers last. When it finally arrives, we will see whether thirty years of thinking produced something truly special or just something very, very deliberate. Either way, I am going to be watching closely.
No comments yet