The Incredibles Director Returns With a Sci-Fi Detective Movie on Netflix

Netflix just dropped the first trailer for Ray Gunn, a new animated movie from Brad Bird — the director behind The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, and Ratatouille. Two of those won Oscars. The trailer is packed with retro-futuristic eye candy: flying cars, jet packs, laser guns, aliens, and a classic smoky-voiced femme fatale. If you liked Bird's earlier work, this looks like more of the same polish, just aimed at a grown-up crowd.

The story follows private eye Raymond Gunn, voiced by Sam Rockwell, in a giant city called Metropia — an alternate future imagined as if it were designed in 1939. He gets pulled into a case involving aliens, a murder, and a multimedia superstar named Venus Nova, played by Scarlett Johansson. The voice cast is stacked: Tom Waits, Matt Berry, Bobby Cannavale, Alan Tudyk, and Patton Oswalt all show up. Bird has called it a mashup of The Maltese Falcon and Buck Rogers.

Here's the fun part: Bird has been carrying this idea around for about 30 years. It started when he heard the opening of the B-52s' "Planet Claire" and mistook it for the theme from the old TV detective show Peter Gunn. That sparked the idea of a futuristic detective whose name is a pun on "ray gun." The script, co-written with Matthew Robbins, sat in a filing cabinet at Warner Brothers while Bird made other films. Now it's finally getting made.

Ray Gunn arrives on Netflix on December 18, and there's a limited 70mm theatrical run starting December 4 if you want the big-screen version. One thing to know before you queue it up for family night: unlike Pixar's usual fare, this one targets older viewers with more mature themes. Think detective-story grit rather than talking toys.