In a recent interview with Variety, Brad Bird, known for directing animated films like The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, and Incredibles II, discussed why he chose to make his upcoming film, Ray Gunn, for Skydance Animation despite his extensive work with Pixar. The film, a passion project for Bird for over 30 years, began as a project he pitched to Warner Bros. Animation before he directed The Iron Giant instead.
As Bird explained to Variety, he chose not to pitch the film to Pixar because of the studio’s reputation for catering their animated films to a more general, younger-skewed audience. “I never pitched it at Pixar because I felt like it wasn’t in Pixar’s wheelhouse exactly,” Bird explained. “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,’ and inevitably some of them would go, ‘Well, my little Jimmy would be unhappy at this.’”
Bird also explains that, in his view, there are “10 billion animated films” made for a younger audience, but not many that cater more toward teenage and adult audiences. Bird adds that he believes making animated films for a teenage- and adult-skewed audience “shouldn’t be a controversial decision, and yet was always treated that way by the ministers of resource allocation [at Pixar].”
This is where Skydance Animation came in. Bird had a previous relationship with Skydance, having directed Mission: Impossible: Ghost Protocol for the studio. Through Skydance Animation, headed by Bird’s former studio leader, John Lasseter, former head of Pixar, he believed the studio would let him skew more toward his target audience. “My thought when [they] got involved was that they’ll go with me on this slightly different audience tangent,” Bird said. “And here it is.”
Ray Gunn is a sci-fi noir hybrid that follows the titular character (voiced by Sam Rockwell), a private detective living in a 60s-styled metropolis who gets wrapped up in a massive conspiracy after taking on a case involving a famous pop idol, Venus Nova (voiced by Scarlett Johansson). The film also features the voices of Tom Waits, Alan Tudyk, Matt Berry, and Bobby Cannavale. Netflix is releasing the film in select theaters on December 4th before making it available to stream exclusively on the platform on December 18th.
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