Brad Bird's latest film!
Something I’ve enjoyed watching recently is the trailer for Brad Bird’s latest film Ray Gunn.
If you’re not aware, Brad Bird is an Oscar winning writer, and director, working in both animation and live action. He wrote and directed The Incredibles films, Ratatouille, and The Iron Giant, amongst others.
Ray Gunn is a film which Brad Bird first devised around 30 years ago, as a hand-drawn feature, but could never get a studio to make. It’s a story he’s told many times in interviews over the years but, after being locked away in a studio vault, Bird was finally able to regain the rights and bring the film to life at Skydance Animation.
Unfortunately, Ray Gunn seems to have been caught in the fallout of the Paramount/Warner Bros merger. It is one of the final films to be made by Skydance Animation (part of Paramount) for Netflix, and will only get a very limited theatrical run before being released on the streamer.
The reason I’m so keen to watch this film is because of the impact that the The Incredibles had on me. I had just left art college, after spending three years studying animation, but I was still very unsure about which direction to head in. At the time, most of the work which was available in the UK was in visual effects for live action films. Given this reality, it seemed logical that I start creating a showreel tailored towards realistic animation. Then I watched The Incredibles.
The film blew me away. It really was like nothing else around at the time and, sitting in the cinema, I knew that this was what I wanted to do. It absolutely solidified the path that I wanted to take. Working in visual effects might have been prestigious but it never captivated me the way that high quality, stylised, character animation did. I refocused my efforts on improving my character animation skills in the hope that, one way or another, I would find a way to do this for a living.
Whilst it’s a shame that the film will not be shown more widely, I’m certainly excited to see it when it’s finally released to the world in December.
