Brad Bird, the director of The Incredibles and The Iron Giant, gave his animated detective story Ray Gunn its world premiere at a Royal Festival Hall gala.
Brad Bird, the director of The Incredibles, gave Ray Gunn its world premiere at the Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank on Saturday 10 October 2026.
Bird was born in Kalispell, Montana, in 1957 and began animating at eleven. The short he finished two years later, a version of The Tortoise and the Hare, won him an invitation to Disney.
After the California Institute of the Arts he worked on Amazing Stories for Steven Spielberg. He then spent eight seasons as a creative consultant on The Simpsons.
The Iron Giant came in 1999, then The Incredibles and Ratatouille at Pixar, and both Pixar films won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.
Ray Gunn is set in Metropia, a city in an alternative 1939 where aliens are the dominant species. A private investigator is drawn into a murder that is not what it seems. Bird wrote the screenplay with Matthew Robbins.
Sam Rockwell, Scarlett Johansson and Tom Waits lead the voice cast. Bird has argued for his whole career that animation is an art rather than a genre for children.