The future may look bright in the world of Ray Gunn — but the taller the skyscrapers, the longer the shadows.

The new trailer for Brad Bird’s upcoming animated film rockets straight into Metropia, a dazzling retrofuturistic city where humans and aliens live side by side, flying cars speed through the skies, and buildings stretch a mile high. But look past the streamlined Art Deco–inspired sheen, and you’ll find a reality that’s grittier: murder, corruption, and one “flameout” of a detective trying to make sense of a changing world.

Bird, the director of Academy Award winners The Incredibles and Ratatouille, first dreamed up the film — a blend of detective noir and sci-fi adventure — at the beginning of his career. “The elevator pitch I came up with is The Maltese Falcon meets Buck Rogers,” Bird says. “I like both of those genres, and blending them together seemed fun, and a chance to play with a lot of very cinematic elements and extreme characters.”

At the center of the mystery is Raymond Gunn (Sam Rockwell), a detective who already seems like he’s from a bygone era — even in the future. With much of a private detective’s actual legwork now performed by tiny “pry bots,” Ray and his cyclopean alien partner Eye-Ra (Tom Waits) are among the last investigators still pounding the asphalt the old-fashioned way.

Then Venus Nova (Scarlett Johansson), one of Metropia’s biggest and most controversial megastars, enters his orbit — and wherever Venus goes, scandal follows. Soon, Ray is chasing a trail through Venus’s treacherous circle of hangers-on and moving between Metropia’s glamorous heights and seamy underworlds. “You’re being hopeful with the city, but you’re still showing there’s a dark underbelly — things that happen in the shadows,” Bird says.

If the new trailer looks and sounds a bit more grown-up than you’d expect from a major animated spectacle, that’s by design. Ray Gunn calls back to the films the director grew up loving: Bogart detective movies, the noir film Out of the Past, and the worlds of Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade. Bird says, “Animation is too fun a medium, and too interesting, to limit what kind of stories can be told.”

Tune into Ray Gunn on Dec. 18, only on Netflix. (In select theaters and limited 70mm Dec. 4).