Netflix just added a Best Animated Feature contender to its slate: Brad Bird's "Ray Gunn," which held its world premiere Saturday at the London Film Festival and arrives theatrically December 4, 2026, before streaming December 18.

The film comes out of Skydance Animation's original deal with the streamer, and David Ellison — the Skydance chief now steering Paramount — counts among its producers alongside John Lasseter, Bird, Lisa Beroud and Dana Goldberg. For Ellison, awards-season hardware this cycle looks far likelier through Netflix than through anything at Paramount or, so far, Warner Bros.

Bird, the Oscar-winning director of "Ratatouille" and "The Incredibles," co-wrote the script with Matthew Robbins. The film runs 1 hour 59 minutes and carries a PG rating.

What kind of film is it?

A sci-fi/film noir mashup. "Ray Gunn" channels Bogart-era detective classics — "The Maltese Falcon," "The Big Sleep," the Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler mode — and folds in touches of "Chinatown," Altman's "The Long Goodbye," Robert Mitchum in "Farewell My Lovely," plus animated touchstones like "The Jetsons" and "Who Framed Roger Rabbit," a dash of "Blade Runner" and the "Star Wars" cantina.

The main setting, Metropia, is described as an "alternate future" channeling 1939. Sam Rockwell voices Ray Gunn, an analog private detective operating in a fully digitized world as though it were San Francisco circa 1941. Scarlett Johansson plays Venus Nova, a pop superstar accused of murdering one of her ex-husbands, in a Bogie-and-Bacall-style pairing.

The supporting voice cast includes:

• Tom Waits as Eye Ra Kadock, Gunn's cyclopian alien partner
• Alan Tudyk as Barry Vogel, Venus's first husband and manager at record label Megamax
• Matt Berry as Slugsy, an alien mob boss
• Bobby Cannavale as Arnold Dam, co-owner of the Moon Room
• Michelle Rodriguez as Police Capt. Roz Drexler
• Michael Chernus as former cop Sam Stelfreeze
• Kathryn Hunter as alien smuggler Vanzine Kaluta

Johansson also sings on a couple of tracks by New Zealand's Kimba, and Michael Giacchino composed the score.

Does it change the animated feature race?

On paper, yes. Bird brings two decades of awards pedigree, and the film's blend of vibrant CGI, noir homage and adult-skewing storytelling positions it as the rare animated title pitched at grown-ups first — kids get dragged along rather than the other way around.

Netflix now has a proven animation director, a marquee voice cast and a December theatrical window, the corridor where animated awards contenders typically launch. The London premiere gives the film a festival platform ahead of qualification.

The competition question remains Ellison's broader awards math: with "Ray Gunn," his clearest path to an Oscar campaign this year runs through the streamer, not the studios he now controls.