Mars Express’ fascinating vision of a robotic future was inspired by film noir and Big Tech

polygon.com:

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].