It’s hard to imagine an animation director more likely to chafe at the restrictions of the big-studio system then Brad Bird. (Or at least, hard to imagine an American animation director; animators from some other more animation-forward countries might be plenty chafed, or possibly just stare at their kid-friendly counterparts with bafflement.) It’s not that Bird has said so much as a word against his longtime bosses and collaborators at Disney or Pixar, where he made The Incredibles and its sequel and took over/saved Ratatouille, resulting in multiple animated classics. It’s not even that Bird’s movies push Disney-level content restrictions to the brink of studio acceptance. But the movies Bird has made are often about exceptional individuals who, well, chafe at the restrictions applied to them, whether by small-minded institutions, individuals, or society at large. So it makes sense that Bird would get in on the streaming-era tendency for deep-pocketed companies to hand major directors substantial sums of money to make their dream project. In Bird’s case, that project — at least in animation; his earthquake epic 1918 remains as yet unmade — is Ray Gunn, a sci-fi noir that premiered at the London Film Festival this weekend ahead of a short theatrical release and a Netflix debut in December.

The funny thing is, Ray Gunn is entirely consistent with Bird’s other animated movies. He’s not, by nature, one of those guys who wants to see way bloodier, way sexier American cartoons. (Or if he does, he doesn’t seem to harbor much ambition to make them himself.) The new movie is a little harder-edged than a Pixar movie, sure; there’s no kid hero for younger audiences to latch onto, the way they might have for the Incredible siblings or The Iron Giant’s Hogarth, and yes, like any noir worth its salt, the plot involves some murder. But any kid who has enjoyed Who Framed Roger Rabbit or any given Star Wars movie should be able to roll with it. It may even, like Roger Rabbit, turn some kids into lifelong noir fans.

This, despite the fact that during Ray Gunn, it’s easy to suspect that Bird likes noir more for its retro qualities than its exploration of humanity’s shadowy depths. The title character, voiced by Sam Rockwell, is a private detective in a retro-futuristic world — jetpacks and hologram ads but also black-and-white television, like Blade Runner meets TaleSpin — and he’s not one of those noir heroes who hides some bottom-line decency beneath a hard-boiled or wisecracking façade. There’s a little wisecracking; how could there not be, with Sam Rockwell playing a P.I.? But despite his dwindling finances, Gunn doesn’t come across as laid particularly low, and his decency sits pretty close to the surface. His alien partner Eyera (Tom Waits) carps a little more about money and negotiable ethics, but he’s ultimately similarly upright and loyal.

Their money situation seems to turn around when Arnold Dom (Bobby Cannavale) hires Gunn to spy on his ultra-famous wife, the pop star Venus Nova (Scarlett Johansson), who’s known in the media for her mercurial temper. The job itself seems pretty open-and-shut, but in proper noir fashion it draws Gunn into a wider world of intrigue, deception, criminals… the usual stuff. The appeal here is less from the plot mechanics, which are dutifully complicated but broadly predictable (not least because Gunn is so relatively unwavering), than the virtual set dressing. Bird and his animators have imagined a gleaming world of towering skyscrapers, flying cars, malfunctioning weaponry, aliens living among humans but treated as second-class citizens, and all manner of eye-filling wizardry.

And it’s not just the what of the movie’s look, but the how; Bird is even more of a wizard at choreographing action, as he proved not just in his animated movies but his top-tier Mission: Impossible outing. Ray Gunn isn’t nearly as set-piece-heavy as that movie, or an Incredibles installment; instead, shorter skirmishes or slapstick mishaps or brief pursuits feel like set pieces based sheerly on construction, and how Bird carries visual momentum from one motion to the next. (It’s clearer than ever that if anyone should have taken over Indiana Jones from Spielberg, it should have been him.)

All of this makes Ray Gunn enormously fun to watch, and to listen to. The visual and audio elements only come into conflict when Bird accidentally finds the trouble with hiring actors as vocally distinctive as Rockwell and Johansson. Hearing both of them, especially as leads, can put the actors’ real-life looks in competition with their animated counterparts. Here, the nearly square-jawed Gunn looks a little bland compared to the raffishness of Rockwell IRL, and as gorgeously animated as Venus is, especially as we learn more about the malleability of her image, she’s a little more Generic Animated Babe than the iconic Johansson, though her vocal dexterity is used to its full advantage. (She does all her own singing, to boot.) For that matter, while Eyera is a joy to behold in skittery, bug-like motion, his actual design looks pretty slick for an alien voiced with gravelly charm by Tom Waits.

The presence of aliens in this world might feel like one sci-fi step too far — it takes it from alternate future to flat-out fantasy — but those characters are used for a strain of inclusivity, with the aliens clearly discriminated against unfairly, that overpowers Bird’s vaguely Randian leanings. His old-school-achiever concerns emerge more when addressing the career of Venus Nova, which pits mass-appeal pop against more “honest” (which, wouldn’t you know it, also sounds more old-fashioned) songwriting that her handlers are afraid will alienate her massive fandom. It may not be particularly wise about the creation of pop music (though there is a twist that is pretty clever about the creation of modern pop-music imagery and legacy), but those moments feel like Bird parsing the difference between his slightly edgy animated dream project and the compromises demanded even by his allies.

Yet there’s no escaping some compromise or another, as he probably knows, especially in a world (on and off screen) so infatuated with digital fakeness. Bird originally wanted to do Ray Gunn in classic hand-drawn animation, and there are moments where the gee-whiz smoothness of his big-budget CG feels at odds with the pretense that his a noirish mystery. He’s a child of Tomorrowland through and through, which makes it all the more baffling that no one at Disney or Pixar ever wanted to spot him the cash to make what is ultimately a close-to-all-ages sci-fi thriller with a few lovely romantic grace notes. They let him make the actual Tomorrowland movie, a far stranger and less appealing enterprise than this piece of pop entertainment. Which company actually puts up the money is immaterial, of course, except that Ray Gunn very much deserves to be seen on a big screen — that’s how I saw it, and it plays great both on a big canvas and in front of a big crowd — and Netflix mostly only affords that as a vanity sideshow. (There are 70mm prints being struck, so New York City or Los Angeles residents especially should have a shot at seeing it in an ultra-analog format.) It’s that extratextual knowledge that adds a little bittersweet oomph to the film’s satisfying ending; yes, a streamer took a chance on this not-especially-risky crowdpleaser for now, but what’s the move for his next one?

Ray Gunn will be in select theaters December 4th and releases on Netflix December 18th.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.