Mars Express
2023 · Jérémie Périn
For when you're craving smart, grown-up science fiction — a twisty detective story to lean into with full attention, ideally with the lights off and no phone. Challenge over comfort, and richly rewarding for it.
What it's about
Mars, 2200: hungover private detective Aline Ruby and her android partner Carlos — a synthetic restoration of a dead colleague, carrying his memories and his widow's grief — are hired to find a hacker, and the case keeps opening downward into jailbroken robots, brain farms, political corruption, and a missing girl whose secret could upend everything. Classic noir plotting in a meticulously imagined future.
The experience
Cool, propulsive, and dense — a procedural that trusts you to keep up, laced with melancholy about what minds are worth in a world that manufactures them. It's the rare sci-fi that makes you think as hard as it entertains.
The craft
Jérémie Périn's feature debut is that rarest thing, adult French sci-fi animation played completely straight: clean-lined, gorgeous world-building dense with throwaway details that imply a whole economy and politics. The Martian cityscapes and hardware design reward a big screen and close viewing.
Why it matters
It became an instant touchstone for grown-up animation outside the American and Japanese systems, proving French animation could deliver hard science fiction with real ideas about artificial minds.
Reception & legacy: how Mars Express was received, argued over, and remembered →
A hungover private detective and her android partner — a synthetic restoration of a dead colleague, complete with his memories and his widow's grief — chase a missing student through the terraformed cities of Mars, and the case keeps opening downward: jailbroken robots, brain farms, the whole rickety scaffolding of a society built on artificial minds. Jérémie Périn, who cut his teeth on the cult series Lastman and one of the most notorious music videos of the 2000s, made his feature debut with this rarest of things: adult French science-fiction animation played completely straight. The lineage is proudly legible — Moebius's Martian vistas, the procedural melancholy of Ghost in the Shell, hard-boiled plotting worthy of a Richard Morgan novel — but the world-building is Périn's own, dense with throwaway details that imply an economy, a politics, a history. The clean-line 2D figures move through subtly dimensional space, and the film premiered at Cannes in 2023 before earning a César nomination. Its real subject, smuggled inside the thriller mechanics, is labor: who owns a mind, and what a copy is owed. The final movement earns comparisons to the genre's very best.
Lines of influence
- Ghost in the Shell (1995) — Supplies the case-file structure Mars Express runs on — a synthetic investigator working a procedural that keeps dissolving into the ontology of a 'ghost' in manufactured hardware; the seed's own facets name it directly.
- Blade Runner (1982) — Codifies the neon SF-noir grammar of a burnt-out detective hunting artificial people, and the interrogation-as-personhood-test that Mars Express restages with robots and copied minds.
- Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (2004) — Turns gynoids loaded with copied souls into a procedural-as-philosophy; its melancholy robot-partner-and-cop dyad is the direct model for Aline and the android Carlos.
- La Planète sauvage (Fantastic Planet) (1973) — Establishes French adult animation as serious speculative design, treating SF worldbuilding as allegorical craft rather than children's fare — the tradition Périn writes into.
- Les Maîtres du temps (Time Masters) (1982) — Puts Moebius's clean-line creature and vehicle design straight onto the animated screen, the ligne-claire SF draughtsmanship Mars Express inherits as its house style.
- Heavy Metal (1981) — Brings the Métal Hurlant / Moebius adult-SF comics idiom into animation — the sex, hardware and cosmic sleaze register that Mars Express keeps in its adult-animation license.
- Akira (1988) — Sets the benchmark for hand-drawn maximalist future-city density; Mars Express's crowded terraformed-Mars backgrounds descend from its packed, lived-in urban linework.
- Metropolis (2001) — Otomo-scripted marriage of noir missing-persons mystery to an artificial girl whose consciousness anchors the plot — the machine-soul-plus-detective armature Mars Express reuses.
- Renaissance (2006) — The immediate French predecessor: an animated SF-noir built entirely around a hard-boiled missing-person detective procedural, proving the national appetite for the exact hybrid.
- Blade Runner 2049 (2017) — A detective procedural in which manufactured beings confront implanted memory and the grief of not being unique — the copies-and-consciousness core Mars Express shares and updates.
- Moon (2009) — A worker meets his own clone and discovers corporate ownership of duplicated life — the labor-and-ownership plus grief-of-copies knot that drives the seed's backup-brain plot.
- A Scanner Darkly (2006) — Uses animation as the deliberate medium for a fractured-identity SF procedural, arguing (as Mars Express does) that drawn imagery best renders a mind that has been split or copied.
- Cowboy Bebop: The Movie (2001) — Animated hard-boiled bounty procedural with jazz-noir mood and dense, functional SF worldbuilding — the adult-anime detective register Mars Express operates in.
- Avril et le monde truqué (April and the Extraordinary World) (2015) — French 2D clean-line SF designed by Jacques Tardi — the closest national sibling in ligne-claire draughtsmanship applied to speculative genre animation.
- Dark City (1998) — Noir detective plot where memory and identity are externally authored and rewritten nightly, extending the Blade Runner strand of who-owns-a-manufactured-self that Mars Express works within.
- J'ai perdu mon corps (I Lost My Body) (2019) — Contemporary French adult 2D animation proving the medium carries grown-up, melancholy genre storytelling for festival audiences — the same Cannes/César-track movement Mars Express belongs to.