The first full Ray Gunn trailer is a feast for the eyes

Brad Bird is back with a retrofuturist noir.

By Drew Gillis  |  September 23, 2026 | 9:00am
Image courtesy of Netflix
Film News Ray Gunn
The first full Ray Gunn trailer is a feast for the eyes

It looks like Brad Bird remembered who he was, and the game changed. It’s been eight years since Bird has been at the helm of an animated movie—2018’s Incredibles 2—and 19 years since he directed his last original animated movie with Ratatouille. But the first full trailer for his latest, Ray Gunn, which Netflix shared this morning, looks both like a totally new venture for Bird and a reminder of why his films like The Incredibles and The Iron Giant are rightly held up as beloved classics. 

There is a lot going on in this trailer, which introduces its main characters and the retrofuturist world in which they—and a whole bunch of aliens ranging from adorable to frightening—live. The official logline for Ray Gunn reads: “In Metropia, a gigantic city in an alternate future as seen from 1939, private eye Raymond Gunn is drawn into a case involving aliens, murder and a multimedia star named Venus Nova.” If this trailer is any indication, Ray Gunn isn’t just into the aesthetics of 1939 but the genre, too, presenting something with at least some strong noir elements. Sure, noir didn’t really take off until the mid-40s, but Ray Gunn is imagining the future, after all! 

Ray Gunn will open in limited theaters—including some 70mm screenings—on December 4. It’ll arrive on Netflix on December 18. 

 
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