originally posted at https://canmom.tumblr.com/post/754097...
Animation Night is baaaaaack from Annecy break!
And yeah, the last couple weeks of this blog have been pretty Annecy focused here on the canmom entertainment sphere. And tonight that will continue! For tonight we shall right a wrong! And that wrong is…
…that wrong is that I didn’t get to see Mars Express at Annecy last year. @mendely did and I was super jelly, OK!
For real though, this was among the hottest tickets at Annecy last year, and despite queuing a bunch of hours, I didn’t stand a chance to get in without a reservation. But what is it? Well, it’s a scifi movie directed by Jérémie Périn. Who’s Jérémie Périn?
Well, the true veterans may recall Animation Night 1, when I showed you a certain music video for a song called Fantasy by DyE…
…that’s not gonna embed, is it? But if you know, you know. (If you don’t know, it’s the one where the teens break into the swimming pool to make out and such and then a bunch of them turn into tentacle monsters.)
So Jérémie Périn is the guy who directed that! He’s also well known for directing Lastman, a crowdfunded action series in which a boxer battles a bunch of superpowered agents to try to protect a psychic girl, not that you’d gather any of that from this trailer…
and writing for Crisis Jung by Bobbypills - don’t blink or you might miss the boob-growing henshin and the guy with a chainsaw dick…
And while Crisis Jung isn’t primarily his project, we can still definitely trust that when Périn is at the wheel, we’ll seem some incredibly stylish, anime-inflected drama and also some proper freaky imagery now and again.
Mars Express, however, is Périn’s first foray into film rather than TV animation, building on the big success of Lastman - and a pretty high-effort foray at that, taking some five years to make. And by all accounts it kicks total ass.
But what’s it about? Classic cyberpunk noir material: a detective and the android replica of her partner return to their home planet Mars after apprehending a robot hacker. But the hacker is released, and they’re given a new mission - to work with this hacker and go down to a colony where, ostensibly, humans and androids live in harmony, and track down a guy who jailbreaks the androids from their artificial constraints. That sounds pretty shady already, right? But the dirty secrets are only beginning.
Mars Express definitely pays its homages to those classic 90s anime films and OVAs like Ghost in the Shell and Armitage III, as well as games like Another World for the Amiga, but by all accounts gives it a fresh approach, with grounded characters - protagonist Aline struggling with alcoholism, her reconstructed partner Carlos with his floating holographic head carrying the whole identity issue of being a robot clone who’s been rejected by his original’s wife - which anchors plenty of juicy scifi concepts like renting out your brain as a computer, or something called ‘resonance’ which is how robots do it. What does that mean? The review I’m reading left it at that! Guess we’ll find out.
Like most European productions it brought together a long list of production companies and it’s a little tricky to figure out which ones are actual animation houses, but the main company seems to be ‘Everybody on Deck’. They previously worked with Périn on Lastman, but otherwise largely seem to have worked on live action films. However, the animation was split among a variety of studios.
We can at least say that it brought in French animators from across the shop, some even on this very website. (At least I seem to recall seeing people having posted about having worked on it, though if I search now I mostly find peoples’ reviews of the film). It’s animation leans realist, with naturalistic motion taking advantage of anime-style 3s and 2s to give it a weighty feeling, embedding its characters in detailed environments with strong colour design…
And if we want to know more than that, we’re in luck, since there’s a pretty substantial 16-part making-of series partly available on Catsuka’s youtube, starting with episode 1 showing the development of the script, with Périn and co-writer Laurent Sarfati bouncing ideas off each other. Only two other episodes are available: episode 11 shows some of the voice recording, and episode 16, which talks about the actual animation, interviewing various animators and showing some shot breakdowns. The last of these is probably the most interesting (to animators), talking about how the film went about realising Périn’s ‘precise, clinical’ realist style.
The team were evidently very conscious of this being, for France, a first of its kind - a French-animated thriller targeting adults, with big ambitions to become a landmark film in French animation, able to stand up against the best anime. I’m not sure it’s actually the first - for example, Summit of the Gods is also a tense, French-animated thriller with a realist art style! - but it’s definitely a genre where there are very few examples to compare, and the team’s ambition comes across as absolutely genuine.
That’s probably enough to go on! We’ll definitely also check out some of Périn’s other work tonight, but Mars Express is our main feature!
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