Mars Express

Jérémie Périn's Mars Express premiered in the main competition of the Annecy International Animation Film Festival in June 2023, and reviewers there counted it among the strongest French animated features of the decade. It is Périn's first feature; he had previously made the cult adult animated series Lastman (2016) for France 4 and worked extensively in music-video animation. He wrote the screenplay with Laurent Sarfati.

Léa Drucker (who would later win Best Actress at the Venice Film Festival for Last Summer the same year) leads the voice cast alongside Mathieu Amalric, Daniel Njo Lobé and Marie Bouvet. The film is animated in 2D through a hybrid pipeline that combines hand-drawn character animation with computer-generated environments and vehicles, a technique developed at Everybody on Deck and Maybe Movies, the two French animation houses behind the production. Joachim Hérissé supervised the cinematography.

Gebeka Films released it in France, where it grossed approximately €1.5 million on a relatively small art-house release. GKIDS acquired the rights for the U.S. market, and the film appeared on year-end critics' lists in the Hollywood Reporter, IndieWire and The New York Times in 2024. It is one of the defining works in the recent renaissance of adult-oriented French animation, and it belongs in the same conversation as Pablo Berger's Robot Dreams (2023) and the continuing work of Tomm Moore's Cartoon Saloon in Ireland.