Picture Credit: Netflix
At Netflix’s big Animation Showcase, attendees were treated to an absolute masterclass. To celebrate the upcoming Skydance Animation film, now confirmed for launch on December 18th, 2026, Aardman Animations co-founder Sir Peter Lord sat down with Bird for an extensive conversation that culminated in a massive deep-dive into Bird’s highly anticipated 3D animated feature: Ray Gunn.
Described as a retro-futuristic, neo-noir mystery, Ray Gunn has been a passion project of Bird’s for decades. Here is a complete, quote-filled breakdown of everything the two animation legends discussed, giving us our most in-depth look yet at the film’s origins, aesthetic, cast, and Bird’s fierce dedication to pure animation.
Speaking of which, Bird recalled early pushback from within the industry itself about animation as a medium for certain stories, especially one like Ray Gunn: “When I first started in the business, there were old animators… that would say, you know, ‘if you can do it in live action… don’t do it in animation.’ And I thought, well, animation is going to be extinct if that’s true. Because live action was getting to the point where it could do anything. But that’s never been the reason to do animation.”
For Bird, the true power of the medium is “caricature” in its ability to boil a character’s looks and movements down to their absolute essence. He also praised animation’s ability to shift emotional tones “on a dime” much faster and more effectively than live-action.
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The B-52s and a 30-Year Journey Out of the Vault
Ray Gunn has been floating around in the Hollywood ether for a long time, but where did the idea come from? Bird revealed the spark came from a surprisingly goofy place: a misheard pop song.
“Basically, I heard a song, and I thought it was another song. That’s how it started,” Bird explained. “It was ‘Planet Claire’ by the B-52s… I thought it was the theme from ‘Peter Gunn’, which was Henry Mancini’s famous theme. And then it kind of went… [imitates song]. And it sounded like a 50s monster movie or something. And so I went, no, no, it’s not Peter Gunn, what is it? It’s Ray Gunn. And then I went, that’s cool, that’s the guy’s name.”
While Bird joked about the rumors that he’s been working on the movie non-stop for 30 years, he clarified that it actually sat in a filing cabinet at Warner Brothers for a long time before he negotiated to get the rights out of turnaround. “It was nicely preserved, and when you brought it out, it heated up just fine. It was still very delicious… I just stayed enthusiastic about the idea.”
If he had made the film back then, it would have been hand-drawn. But today, Bird noted, “the thing that I love about computer animation is that you can move the camera and treat it like dimensional space. And real lenses. You can mimic the qualities of real lenses.”
RAY GUNN – Raymond Gunn (Sam Rockwell) and Venus Nova (Scarlett Johansson). Cr: Skydance Animation ©2026
“Buck Rogers Meets The Maltese Falcon”
If you are expecting a sleek, modern cyberpunk future, think again. Bird designed the world to look like what people in the past thought the future would be.
“People don’t call futuristic weapons Ray Guns anymore. That’s an older term,” Bird noted. “So that automatically made me think of if you’re going to do a future detective movie, wouldn’t it be cool if it kind of looked like what we associate with classic detective movies? So that’s from the 30s and the 40s. This movie takes place in the future as seen from 1939. So it’s Buck Rogers meets the Maltese Falcon.”
The film takes place in an enormous, urban city with mile-high buildings. Bird drew heavy inspiration from classic futuristic designers like Hugh Ferris and Raymond Loewy, leaning into the optimistic Art Deco and Streamline eras that were effectively killed by World War II.
But beneath that shiny, optimistic vision of the city, there is a classic noir underbelly. “There’s something about having an optimistic vision of the city and still showing that you still had desperate characters and slime balls and corruption still happening,” Bird said, teasing that the film will feature plenty of sleaze, alongside actual aliens.
A Star-Studded Cast (and a Soccer Coach)
Voice acting is the lifeblood of animation, and Bird has assembled a powerhouse trio to lead his mystery:
- Sam Rockwell stars as the titular detective, Ray Gunn.
- Scarlett Johansson plays a main character named Venus Nova.
- Tom Waits lends his legendary, gravelly voice to an alien named Ira.
Bird emphasized how vital great voice actors are to the exhaustive animation process: “What takes an actor 10 seconds to say may take an animator a month to animate. And so… that animator is going to listen to that line hundreds of times. And if there’s nothing in the line, you can’t dig that deep on it. But really good voice actors give you something that excites you.”
In a hilarious reveal, Bird shared that the voice of a snarky weapons dealer featured in an exclusive clip wasn’t an A-lister at all, but rather it was his son’s soccer coach, a man named Buck. “My son said, ‘you know who would be a great voice? Buck.’… He’s not an actor, but he did very well,” Bird laughed.
Pure Animation, Zero Mo-Cap
Because of his deep respect for the art form, Bird was incredibly proud to announce that Ray Gunn relies entirely on pure keyframe animation. There is absolutely no motion capture used in the film.
“I think the thing that I’m really unusually happy about is that we took on some really tough-to-do animation, but it is still animation,” Bird proudly stated. “Some people will say, well, you know, that scene is subtle, so you must have done mo-cap or something like that. And I will proudly go, no, it was animation and animators acted out the scenes… It doesn’t look like live action. It feels like live action, but it doesn’t look like it. It’s a little bit like dance… The medium of animation is amazing.”
RAY GUNN – Venus Nova (Scarlett Johansson) and Raymond Gunn (Sam Rockwell). Cr: Skydance Animation ©2026
Themes, Gadgets, and a Release Window
While Bird was incredibly tight-lipped about the central mystery of the film so as not to spoil the reveals, he did note that the film’s thematic core deals with identity. “It’s more about people who are hiding aspects of themselves… we all have multiple characters in us, and certain people or situations bring out different characters.”
To give the audience a taste, Bird showed a hilarious, dialogue-heavy clip where a desperate Ray Gunn (whose own gun is broken) visits the aforementioned underground dealer (voiced by Buck) to buy a new weapon. The dealer shows off several lethal gadgets, including the “Electron Fryboy” (200,000 volts of pure aggression) and the “Atom Master G-Coil” (which fires a violent laser grid). Ray eventually sets his sights on an “L8-13 Fire Blaster,” a delicate prototype powered by alien technology, and attempts to lowball the dealer with a measly $40.
To close out the panel, Bird treated the attendees to the first seven minutes of the film, and finally answered the question on everyone’s mind: When is it coming out?
Bird officially confirmed that Ray Gunn will hit Netflix at the end of the year, and indeed, we now know that to be December 18th.
We should have more on Ray Gunn to come in the next few days – stay tuned!
