In December, Netflix will release Ray Gunn, a long-gestating passion project from Academy Award-winner Brad Bird, who gave us The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, Ratatouille and Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol.
Described by Bird himself as “The Maltese Falcon meets Buck Rogers,” the animated feature is a retro-futuristic/decopunk film noir/pulp sci-fi sendup set in an alternate version of 1939.
One of the last decent guys operating on the two-faced streets of Metropia, Raymond Gunn (Sam Rockwell) works as a private investigator alongside his cyclopean alien partner, Eyera (Tom Waits). In true hardboiled fashion, the titular shamus gets in way over his head after accepting what appears to be the simple job of looking after a beautiful multimedia star—and potential femme fatale—named Venus Nova (Scarlett Johansson).
“Ray Gunn has been in my mind for over 30 years,” Bird said in a statement. “The film is a blend of sci-fi and classic detective movies from the ’40s… I’ve been a fan of both of those sort of genres, and blending them together seemed fun, and a chance to play with a lot of very cinematic elements, and extreme characters.”
Long before Skydance Animation and Netflix allowed Bird to finally realize Ray Gunn, however, another production paved the way by delivering an unabashed love letter to the larger-than-life swashbuckling adventurism and derring-do of classic film serials and animated shorts made during the 1930s and ’40s.
Remembering Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow Ahead of Ray Gunn
That would be writer-director Kerry Conran’s 2004 cult classic Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, which also takes place in a noir-ish 1939 parallel full of anachronistic technology—robots, finned rocket ships, jetpacks, an aircraft carrier floating above the clouds and, of course, ray guns. Completing the picture are plucky journalist Polly Perkins (Gwyneth Paltrow) and intrepid pilot Joe Sullivan, a.k.a. Sky Captain (Jude Law), who investigate a sinister conspiracy initiated by a mysterious figure known only as Totenkopf (German for “death’s head”).
In the official book devoted to the movie’s development and production, Kerry’s brother, Kevin Conran (who served as both production and costume designer), traced the project’s roots back to the 1939 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows, New York.
Its theme? “The World of Tomorrow.” A showcase, Kevin wrote, for “ideas and technologies that would end up being part of our daily lives decades later, that influenced my brother and I a great deal.”
Dialing up the serial homage sensibilities Steven Spielberg and George Lucas had while making Raiders of the Lost Ark to critical levels, Sky Captain is basically a live-action riff on the Superman cartoons produced by Fleischer Studios.
Even Bird had to admit the Conran boys beat him to the punch a little bit, telling Animation Magazine, “The only part that’s a bit disappointing for me is that we had a number of ingredients in the project that no one had really done well on the movie screen before. But in the intervening decades, someone did some aspect of it, for example, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow did the retro Fleischer Superman aesthetic.”
“The film that you see today is exactly what we were pitching back then,” he continued. “We have elements of noir meeting the future, and it’s actually great because we haven’t seen anything like that for a while, so it’s good that it took some time to arrive. I’m hoping that the blend feels natural and feels fresh today.”
From its bombastic title to its stylistic execution, Conran’s first and only directorial effort sweats ambition and coolness from every pore. A wide-eyed visual feast unafraid to take big creative swings. To quote Roger Ebert’s glowing four star review, “It’s like a film that escaped from the imagination directly onto the screen, without having to pass through reality along the way.”
And despite its palpably retro atmosphere, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow pioneered modern filmmaking techniques as the first major Hollywood release shot entirely with blue screen. Sadly, the Conrans’ brazen experiment failed to rake in big box office numbers, only grossing $57.9 million worldwide. Many sources report the budget as $70 million, but Kevin disputes that figure in the book, estimating it to be closer to $14 million. Why it was inflated, he has no idea.
“Had the $14 million story been told from the beginning, I believe the entire narrative around the making of the movie, and perhaps the movie itself, would have been different,” he wrote. “Instead of reading about an inflated budget that didn’t meet box office expectations, people would have read more about how the film represented a groundbreaking leap forward in film production. And, thus, the actual cost of production versus its box office would have fit anyone’s definition of a very good return on investment.”
All of that is to say that Sky Captain walked so Ray Gunn could run. Welcome to the future, folks.
When Does Brad Bird’s Ray Gunn Movie Come Out?
Written by Brad Bird and Matthew Robbins, Ray Gunn will enjoy a limited theatrical run starting Dec. 4 before hitting Netflix two weeks later on Dec. 18.
