Name: Ray Gunn
Director: Brad Bird
Cast: Sam Rockwell, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Waits

The first music heard at the Ray Gunn world premiere was not Michael Giacchino’s score. Brad Bird, introducing his film in London, told the room it was his composer’s birthday, then called up Scarlett Johansson and Sam Rockwell to sing it to him. Variety describes the version as sped up and succinct. Giacchino answered with a selfie of the group.

The sentence that will outlast the evening came from Bird in a separate conversation with Variety. Making animated films for teenagers and adults “shouldn’t be a controversial decision,” he said, “and yet it was always treated that way by the ministers of resource allocation” at Pixar. That is the thesis Ray Gunn now carries onto Netflix, and the first reviews are already arguing over whether the film reaches the audience he fought for.

Why Brad Bird never took Ray Gunn to Pixar

Bird told Variety he never pitched the project at Pixar because it “wasn’t in Pixar’s wheelhouse exactly.” The label, in his account, sets the audience before anyone sees a frame. “If you put a Pixar label on it people would go, ‘Oh well, it’s meant for the same audience that these other films were meant for,'” he said, “and inevitably some of them would go, ‘Well, my little Jimmy would be unhappy at this.'”

His arithmetic is blunt. There are, by his count, “10 billion animated films” for children and far fewer for teenagers and adults, who make up most of the people buying cinema tickets. The resistance he describes is old. Gold Derby reports that Turner Feature Animation and Warner Bros. turned the project down roughly three decades ago as too risky and too adult, and Bird made The Iron Giant instead. It finally found a home at Skydance, which had backed his Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, and its animation studio is run by his former Pixar boss John Lasseter.

The irony sits in his calendar. Bird’s next project returns him to Pixar, a third Incredibles film that he is writing and producing, with Peter Sohn directing.

A PG rating and a split verdict

Ray Gunn is rated PG, which complicates the argument without settling it. The Hollywood Reporter found “a PG storyline that’s simultaneously too simplistic for adults and too serious-minded for kids,” and summed the film up as “a bland pastiche.” Gold Derby, judging from the first half hour screened by Netflix, reached the opposite conclusion: “Kid-friendly animation, this is not.”

Two outlets, one question, two answers. The disagreement lands exactly where Bird drew his line. A film made to escape the children’s shelf is being measured, first of all, by which shelf it belongs on.

A film that began with a misheard song

Bird’s own account of the film starts with sound. Bird told Variety the idea arrived “idiotically after misunderstanding a song”: he heard the B-52’s track “Planet Claire” and took it for a new version of Henry Mancini’s theme from Peter Gunn. “So it was inspired by music,” he said.

The score was recorded at Abbey Road’s Studio One by a 74-piece orchestra, Variety reports, and it is Bird and Giacchino’s sixth film together since The Incredibles. “We talked about this movie during ‘The Incredibles,'” the composer said. For a mystery, his job was restraint: the second-hardest task, he said, was “making sure everything was always in alignment thematically, so that I didn’t give the audience something that they shouldn’t be thinking about.”

Johansson carries the other half of the soundtrack. As the pop star Venus Nova, she performs three songs written by Kimbra, including “Too Much to Ask” and “Innocent,” and Netflix plans an Oscar campaign for “Too Much to Ask” in Best Original Song. Even the Hollywood Reporter’s unimpressed review calls her music “passable.” Johansson told Variety she joined for the director, calling herself “such a massive fan of his” and adding that “it was a dream of mine to collaborate with him on anything.”

Ray Gunn release date and cast

Ray Gunn had its world premiere at the Royal Festival Hall on October 10, as part of the 70th BFI London Film Festival, which runs until October 18. It opens in select theaters on December 4 and arrives on Netflix on December 18, with a running time of 1 hour 59 minutes. Rockwell voices Raymond “Ray” Gunn, a small-time private detective in the retro-futuristic city of Metropia; Johansson voices Venus Nova; Tom Waits voices Ray’s one-eyed alien partner, with Bobby Cannavale, Alan Tudyk, Matt Berry and Michelle Rodriguez also in the cast. Bird wrote the screenplay with Matthew Robbins.

Bird says the script changed “less than you’d think” over three decades. What changed is who decides. On premiere night the room sang before the film played, and the song was kept short. From December, Netflix subscribers, not Pixar’s ministers of resource allocation, settle who Ray Gunn was made for.

Tags: Scarlett Johansson, animated films, Brad Bird, Ray Gunn, Michael Giacchino