“I like you – you’re a throwback,” an interviewee tells Raymond Gunn, the square-jawed, whisky-swilling private eye at the heart of this stylish, careering new animation from Brad Bird, creator of The Incredibles. The same applies to Bird’s film three times over: it is a film noir detective story from the 1940s; a teeming megalopolitan sci-fi from the 1980s; and a thematically rich, classically structured blockbuster of the type that Pixar, where Bird and his producer John Lasseter once worked, used to make in the 2000s.
Sam Rockwell stars as Ray, a hard-bitten but principled Marlowe type from the towering Art Deco future city of Metropia: imagine Fritz Lang’s Metropolis populated by the cast of Monsters, Inc. His latest case involves a popular singer, Scarlett Johansson’s Venus Nova, whose most recent husband (of a few) is found dead in questionable circumstances. Ray and his alien sidekick Eye-ra (an endearingly husky Tom Waits) are charged by Venus’s record company with keeping their client under the public’s radar, and thereby above suspicion, until the launch of her forthcoming album.
The film’s design owes something to The Incredibles’ heady modernist dynamism, but there is a warm physicality – even a slink – to the character animation that is increasingly rare in CG: Rockwell’s Ray exerts an authentic, crumpled attraction, while Johansson’s Venus is an unapologetic bombshell, a Veronica Lake for the K-Pop Demon Hunters age. RC
In UK cinemas from Dec 4, and Netflix from Dec 18
Wicker ★☆☆☆☆
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