Mars Express, the sci-fi detective film from Jérémie Périn, is out on VOD this week. We spoke to Périn about his favorite mystery films, and the inspirations behind the film.
Mars Express is the best animated movie of the year you probably haven’t seen or heard about yet. Set in the 22nd century, the film follows a pair of private investigators on Mars hired to track down an elusive hacker on Earth who is jailbreaking robots. Their investigation quickly takes on a different dimension when the disappearance of a college student sets them on the trail of a conspiracy that threatens to upend human-robot civilization as they know it.
Jérémie Périn is a French animator known for directing the 2016 TV series LastMan, as well as several virally popular (and emphatically NSFW) music videos for electronic dance artists like DyE and Lionel Flairs. Mars Express, his first feature, is an outlier not only in his own body of work, but in the French animation industry as a whole: It’s a grounded, hard-boiled detective story set in a universe with a tone and structure that feels indebted to the film noir classics of the past, albeit transposed into a vision of the far future.
Polygon had the opportunity to chat with Périn about the making of Mars Express, which was released on VOD this week, his inspirations from both Japanese animation and classic cinema, and his approach to the outlandish designs behind the film’s robotic and techno-organic characters.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Polygon: Mars Express has a lot of different twists and turns in its story. Were there any particular detective stories or films that inspired you? What are some of your favorite mysteries?
Jérémie Périn: [When it comes to] my favorite ones, we worked on analyzing them, especially in the narrative aspects for the writing of the script. Those movies were Chinatown, The Long Goodbye, Kiss Me Deadly, Point Blank. That kind of movie, those classic PI, film noir. It’s really something I thought that we didn’t have anymore in cinema, not so much. Under the Silver Lake is maybe a movie in that field as well, but it’s not exactly a PI [movie]. It’s more neo-noir.
I really wanted to get back to that figure of the private investigator. But I realized [while working on Mars Express], all the time, they are men. And I was like, What if we put a woman [in the role] instead, to see if there’s some differences? And the fact is, there wasn’t much difference, except with [the absence] of some classic figures, like the femme fatale. We didn’t have any reason to have such a character there, but those inspirations and references were big in my head.
There were other references too. I really enjoy [.] Three Days of the Condor, All the President’s Men, The Parallax View, Blow Out, [and Francis Ford Coppola’s] The Conversation. Those movies where someone realizes they’re inside a conspiracy and everything is too big for them.
The influence of Japanese animation feels very prominent in Mars Express, particularly in the way characters move and the larger-scale action scenes in the finale.
