Brad Bird has released the first trailer for Ray Gunn, his first original animated film in nearly two decades and a project the director has wanted to make for even longer than that.

The film premieres at the BFI London Film Festival and reaches theaters on December 4 — including limited 70mm prints — before arriving on Netflix on the same date. The voice cast includes Sam Rockwell, Scarlett Johansson, and Tom Waits.

Netflix's logline sets the scene: "In Metropia, a gigantic city in an alternate future as seen from 1939, private eye Raymond Gunn is drawn into a case involving aliens, murder and a multimedia star named Venus Nova."

The premise fuses three genres Bird has spent his career mastering: detective noir, science fiction, and animated comedy-action. He has chased that combination, he says, for years — and has been puzzled that Hollywood resisted it.

"For me, it was an unspent itch. There was something about animation doing film noir but also having more comedy in it and more action," Bird told Esquire. "I always thought it was weird that people were resistant. I thought, Really? How is this not good popcorn stuff?" (The quote, as published, reads "unscratched itch.")

Ray Gunn marks Bird's return to original storytelling after a run of franchise work and studio pictures. The director's previous credits include The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, and Tomorrowland. The new film is his first original animated feature since that earlier stretch of work, closing a gap of nearly twenty years.

The production details point to an unusual level of craft investment for a streaming title. The decision to strike limited 70mm prints signals that Netflix intends to give Ray Gunn a genuine theatrical event release rather than a token qualifying run — a strategy the platform has reserved for a select slate of prestige titles.

The casting reinforces that positioning. Sam Rockwell voices the title detective, Raymond Gunn. Scarlett Johansson and Tom Waits round out the principal cast, with Waits — whose gravel-voiced presence has long carried noir-inflected material — a notably on-brand addition to a 1939-inflected detective story.

The trailer itself, released ahead of the London premiere, introduces audiences to Metropia: a retro-futuristic megacity imagined from the vantage point of the late 1930s, all streamlined art-deco spectacle shadowed by the genre's customary menace. The world premiere at the BFI London Film Festival will serve as the film's first public test before the December rollout.

For Bird, the release closes a circuit that began decades ago. The director has described Ray Gunn as a passion project he carried long before Netflix agreed to finance it — an animated detective story that studios repeatedly declined to make despite his track record.

The December 4 date now puts the film squarely in the awards-season corridor, where animated features compete for attention alongside the year's prestige releases. Whether Bird's "popcorn stuff" argument — that noir, comedy, and action belong together in animation — wins over audiences will be answered when Metropia opens its doors.