I didn’t know what to expect from Mars Express when I sat down in the theater. I just knew it was animated sci-fi… didn’t know it was French nor did I know it would have this cool rotoscoped style. With that title, I expected something for the kids, but it’s a mature film aimed at adults. It has a premise and storyline of an anime but it looks nothing like one. It’s refreshing to get an adult animated film with a different style.

It’s set in a future with an abundance of robots and AI… a human detective and her robot partner are investigating the disappearance of some college students on Mars. It leads to conspiracies and a whole lot of complexity and mystery.

The world-building in this flick is great… even though it barely matters if it’s set on Mars or Earth. It’s the appearance and variety of the robotic and their various body types that is so interesting… as is how it tells you about them. It doesn’t pause to explain how a particular robot works, it just takes a beat to show you matter-of-factly. It’s neat and interesting and there’s a lot of variety and ingenuity in the cultural and technological advancements.

The way the film opens and tells its story is great but the film slowed down a bit in the middle so I was briefly a little lukewarm on it. But the third act pays off with great action, interesting reveals, and a cool overall sci-fi premise. When the Big Events go down, I was engrossed again.

The film has a lot of Ghost in the Shell DNA in it without that film’s abundance of navel-gazing philosophy. It has a similar focus on robotics and investigative work in a cyberpunk-y universe. It’s certainly a more approachable film on first watch than the more inscrutable Ghost.

This is a very cool movie to watch but a cooler movie to exist. We don’t get many films like it from a Western studio. It’s aimed at adults and not from one of the major studios. It reminds me a lot of some of the great (or at least interesting) one-off animated sci-fi films from the ’80s.

I enjoyed this one… it’s good sci-fi and good mystery combined. Worth hunting down (or catching on streaming).

Score: 85