LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 2026 REVIEW! Is Brad Bird’s new animated feature, Ray Gunn, any good? Because given it’s the first premiere of Skydance Corporation’s (SKYD) since the completion of their nosebleed-inducing takeover of Warner Bros. and Paramount just five days ago, studio head David Ellison will doubtless be praying it is.
Skydance borrowed heavily to get the deal through, and if it truly goes south, then a lot of beloved IP like Batman could head for bank vaults, acid-filled or not. So praise be that this is a good film. This is the best cartoon I have seen since Disney Animation fired the man who hired the man who made it.
The screenplay by Brad Bird and Matthew Robbins is based on a story that Bird has been nursing since the 90s. It lovingly details the travails of private eye Ray Gunn (Sam Rockwell), chasing down crummy cases in a whacked-out 1939 vision of the future called Metropia. His business is suffering, in part because his longtime buddy and workmate Eye-Ra (Tom Waits) is a green-skinned, one-eyed, three-legged alien in prejudiced times.
A giant portrait of Venus Nova looms behind two men reflected in a glass display in Ray Gunn.
“It lovingly details the travails of private eye Ray Gunn, chasing down crummy cases in a whacked-out 1939 vision of the future called Metropia.”
With Gunn’s office and car endlessly circled by repo men, he needs to make a buck fast. Enter Arnold Dom (Bobby Cannavale), weary husband number four to capricious mega songstress Venus Nova (Scarlett Johansson). Dom is worried Venus is cheating, so Eye-Ra is duly dispatched to a potential tryst of hers to grab evidence (Eye-Ra’s single eye is telescopic and takes photos). But of course things are not what they seem, and then we’re really off to the races, with film noir and crime fiction tropes incoming in delicious abundance.
Visually, the film is inventive throughout and pops with gorgeous color, even though the vertiginous, traffic-soaked cityscapes can’t help but regularly echo the Star Wars prequels and The Fifth Element. In terms of whether Skydance can really make animation of a similar stripe to the House of Mouse, then yes, technically, there were maybe a couple of hiccups here and there to do with walking and stairs, but otherwise this is gorgeous work from the many thousands of Spanish names in the credits belonging to Skydance Animation Madrid. It looks on par with Pixar’s finest.
"…an unexpectedly hot energy, like Looney Tunes with heavy lasers."
