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Brad Bird’s animated noir Ray Gunn has divided critics after screening at the BFI London Film Festival.
The 69-year-old filmmaker is considered one of the greatest directors in the history of animated film, having written and directed both The Incredibles (2004) and Ratatouille (2007).
Bird has also enjoyed success as a live-action filmmaker with 2011’s Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol.
His latest film is a longtime passion project that blends film noir with science-fiction. Sam Rockwell provides the voice of the titular private eye, with Scarlett Johansson as pop star Venus Nova and Tom Waits as an alien named Eye-Ra.
However, several early reviews have claim the film doesn’t measure up to Bird’s own high standards. The Hollywood Reporter called Ray Gunn a “blandly palatable jumble of sci-fi and neo-noir clichés, not so much awful as underwhelming. Lacking in both visual pop and emotional specificity, it’s a forgettable entry in an otherwise rich career.”
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Variety had similar problems with the film, describing it as “never quite as funny as it should be, while its characters — in particular the eponymous hero, a smooth-talking P.I. voiced by Sam Rockwell — want for texture and soul. Audiences should happily speed along with them on their adventures, but after a fairly long two hours in their company, we don’t feel terribly attached to them.”
As for The AV Club, their critic handed the film a “C” rating and praised the visuals, but added: “The movie’s immaculately designed metropolis is populated by an alien supporting cast whose main function is to hold up a half-baked segregation parable. This starts out vestigial to the story, but becomes increasingly awkward the more it enters the spotlight, resulting in clunky drama overtaking the eye-popping details.”
However, The Guardian were much more impressed with the film, with their reviewer giving it a flawless five stars. The publication called Bird the “Spielberg of animation” and described Ray Gunn as a “terrific family film that retrieves the genre from the doldrums of dull, AI-formulaic stories and visuals. This animation is smart, witty, humane: a fantasy spectacular with old-fashioned entertainment values and some amazing cityscape design showcasing a beguiling and sweet romance.”
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Earlier this year, Bird revealed that he had rejected encouragement from Pixar to make a sequel to Ratatouille.
He told an interviewer: “They’ve made little feints towards that to see how I would react. They’ll, like, crack a joke, but the joke will be a little bit serious, like, ‘Would you?’ And I’m like, ‘No, we told that story.’”