First feature length movie for director Jérémie Périn. He had already directed episodes of the TV show Lastman (2016). In 2018, producer Didier Creste contacted him and Laurent Sarfati, the creator and writer of Lastman, to work on a movie adaptation of their series. Instead, they convinced him to produce an original idea, a neo-noir sci-fi animation movie, for which he was able to find financing, and which eventually became Mars Express.
The movie uses the Three Laws of Robotics from Asimov's Robots novel series to explain the robots' behavior and relationship with humans.
Sometimes an intersection of three roads is shown, the name of the roads are Suzuki, Huelsbeck and Chahi. It's a reference to Yu Suzuki, Chris Huelsbeck and Eric Chahi, three important persons in video game development. Also the hacker's name is Roberta Williams, another key figure in history of video games.
The film premiered in the Cinéma de la Plage section of the 76th Cannes Film Festival in May 2023.
Apart from director Jérémie Périn and writer Laurent Sarfati, there are several people who worked on this movie after working on Lastman (2016), like art director Mikael Robert, or music composers Fred Avril and Philippe Monthaye.