Mars Express

Jérémie Périn's Mars Express premiered at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival in June 2023, where it played in the main competition and won wide critical acclaim as one of the strongest French animated features of the decade. It is Périn's debut feature; he had previously made the cult adult-animation series Lastman (2016) for France 4 and worked extensively in music-video animation. The screenplay is by Périn with Laurent Sarfati.

The voice cast is led by Léa Drucker — who would later win Best Actress at the Venice Film Festival for Last Summer the same year — alongside Mathieu Amalric, Daniel Njo Lobé and Marie Bouvet. The film is animated in 2D using a hybrid pipeline that blends 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. Cinematography supervision is by Joachim Hérissé.

The film was theatrically distributed by Gebeka Films in France, where it grossed approximately €1.5 million on a relatively small art-house release pattern. International rights were acquired by GKIDS for the U.S. market and the film opened on Hollywood Reporter's, IndieWire's, and The New York Times's year-end critics' lists in 2024. It is widely cited as a defining work in the recent renaissance of adult-oriented French animation, alongside Pablo Berger's Robot Dreams (2023) and the continuing work of Tomm Moore's Cartoon Saloon in Ireland.