The first character you meet in Brad Bird’s Ray Gunn isn’t the titular private eye (voiced by Sam Rockwell). Nor is it his alien colleague, Eyera (voiced by Tom Waits), nor even pop superstar Venus Nova (voiced by Scarlett Johansson). Instead, it’s the film’s setting: the massive, retro-futuristic city of Metropia.
Ray Gunn‘s opening sequence zips viewers through the canyons between Metropia’s mile-high buildings. Flying cars and elevated trains transport hordes of humans and aliens alike, but commuters could just as easily rent a jetpack for quick travel. For them, it’s business as usual, but for viewers, it’s a rollicking introduction to an astounding city.
Bird has been working to make Ray Gunn since the ’90s, and he’s stressed Metropia’s importance from the very beginning. In an introductory note on a script draft from 1996, he wrote that the one character he couldn’t adequately capture on the page was Metropia. In this world, he wrote, “Cities are gargantuan jewels that stretch into the heavens.”
As Ray Gunn moved from page to screen, how did Bird and his team manage to bring the jewel of Metropia to life? At a press day at Netflix’s animation studios, Bird and his collaborators broke down the influences and techniques behind the finished version of Metropia, as well as the importance of getting it right.
“The movie took place almost entirely in that city, and if the city wasn’t a character, it would be an empty experience,” Bird told Mashable.
According to Ray Gun art director Wendell Luebbe, Bird wanted to combine two different styles for the look of Metropia. One was the work of early 20th century architect Hugh Ferriss, who dreamed up tall, stepped buildings. (Fittingly for Ray Gunn, he also wrote the 1929 book The Metropolis of Tomorrow.) The other was Streamline Moderne, a sleeker take on Art Deco that took off during the 1930s. While Ferriss’ work is defined by height and blocky geometry, Streamline Moderne is all about curves and aerodynamics.
Credit: Netflix / Skydance Animation
“[Bird] wanted to meld those two together into something we’ve never seen,” Luebbe told press. “So we took a lot of the ideas of Streamline Moderne and then grafted them onto the monumental Hugh Ferriss buildings.”
As Ray Gunn‘s team developed Metropia’s broader visual style, they also made sure to give its many neighborhoods their own distinct feel. The city’s entertainment district is “like Times Square on steroids,” Luebbe said. But you can find quieter, Greenwich Village-type areas with smaller clubs as well. Elsewhere, the city’s aliens live in the Maze, a labyrinthine space whose organic structures drew inspiration from Dale Chihuly’s glass sculptures.
When it came to putting all these ideas on screen, Ray Gunn‘s VFX team faced a challenge in building Metropia.
“To my team, that was very scary, because it’s gigantic,” VFX supervisor Adel Abada told Mashable. Rather than building a full digital model and moving the camera around it, they built out parts of the city to match certain sequences. This better allowed the team to follow the needs of the storyboards until they got the right shot composition.
“When you look at it as a whole movie, you would believe it’s a city that exists, because that’s the goal,” Abada told press. “How can you create the illusion of a city that exists without going through the entire process of building it piece by piece?”
Credit: Netflix / Skydance Animation
Abada and his team knew that the camera movement in Ray Gunn was going to be dynamic, especially in a particularly challenging sequence he described as “a vertical chase.” That meant they couldn’t rely on digital matte painting to create backgrounds. They needed to actually build out the geometry and depth of the buildings so the animators could know where everything was.
Part of designing Metropia also involved figuring out how it functioned as a city. How does Metropia’s sheer height impact how people move around? For example, people using elevators have to strap themselves to the walls, as they move at top speed to ferry people up mile-high buildings.
Inspiration for the latter idea struck Bird as he directed Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, which features a tense climb up the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building. (For reference, it’s just over half a mile tall, making the buildings in Ray Gunn twice its size.)
“You press the elevator to go up to the top floors [of the Burj Khalifa], and your ears pop. It takes a few minutes to get up there,” Bird recalled. “If you lived in a world where there were a lot of mile-high buildings that were taller than the ones in Dubai, people would not want to spend that much time in an elevator, so the elevators would be made really fast.”
The elevators are just one of Ray Gunn‘s many world-building choices dictated by Metropia’s astounding height, but they’re far from the only ones. Scenes set in Metropia’s airborne traffic lanes burst with rich detail about how inhabitants interact with this streamlined beast of a city.
As Bird told Mashable, “You want to give the audience a visual trip.”
Ray Gunn premieres Dec. 18 on Netflix.
Travel costs for the production of this content were paid for by Netflix. The judgments and opinions of Mashable are our own.
