Director – Dean Fleischer Camp, Screenplay – Dean Fleischer Camp, Nick Paley & Jenny Slate, Story – Dean Fleischer Camp, Elisabeth Holm, Nick Paley & Jenny Slate, Producers – Dean Fleischer Camp, Andrew Goldman, Elisabeth Holm, Caroline Kaplan, Terry Leonard, Paul Mezey & Jenny Slate, Photography – Bianca Cline, Stop-Motion Photography – Eric Adkins, Music – Disasterpeace, Animation Director – Kristen Lepore, Supervising Animation Director – Stephen Chiodo, Visual Effects Supervisor – Zdravko “Zee” Stoitchkov, Visual Effects – Allied/Beast (Supervisor – Darren Orr) & Bottleship (Supervisor – Martin Naydenski & Hristo Velev), Production Design – Liz Toonkel. Production Company – You Want I Should LLC/Human Woman Inc./Sunbeam Film & Television.
Cast
Dean Fleischer Camp (Dean), Jenny Slate (Voice of Marcel), Isabella Rossellini (Voice of Connie), Lesley Stahl (Herself)
Plot
Dean has rented a house via AirBNB following a relationship break-up. He has befriended Marcel, a talking shell only an inch tall who lives in the house with his grandmother Connie. Dean has decided to make a series of videos following Marcel. Marcel and Connie have adapted various human-sized items around the house to their needs. Marcel is lamenting his family who have gone missing following the break-up of the couple that owned the house. After Dean posts the videos on YouTube, Marcel suddenly gains a huge online following. Marcel appeals to the fans for help in finding his family, but this only brings curiosity seekers to the house. The fame becomes such that 60 Minutes then messages Marcel wanting to come and conduct an interview.
Marcel the Shell With Shoes On was a series of stop-motion animated short films created by Dean Fleischer Camp. The three original short films were Marcel the Shell With Shoes On (2010), Marcel the Shell With Shoes On, Two (2011) and Marcel the Shell With Shoes On, Three (2014). Each concerned the titular anthropomorphic shell as he narrated his story (where the character’s squeaky voice was narrated by Camp’s then wife Jenny Slate). The shorts became a hit after appearing at short film festivals and being released to YouTube. Camp then received funding to expand it to feature-length with the Chido Brothers, best known for Killer Klowns from Outer Space (1988), coming in to conduct the stop-motion animation. The film received a great critical response and was nominated for Best Animated Film at that year’s Academy Awards, losing out to Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio (2022).
In no time, Marcel the Shell With Shoes On becomes utterly charming and I was kicking myself as to why I didn’t watch it sooner. The film itself is a mix of live-action elements and Stop-Motion Animation but blended in a way where you are never quite sure which aspect is which. Added to this is a certain real-life element – the character of the interviewer Dean is played by the film’s actual director Dean Fleischer Camp, for instance. It is one of the few films that instantly captures the sweetly innocent magic and emotional plaintiveness that used to make Pixar what it was. There’s a character death in mid film – you can see it coming but the film plays it out in ways that are heart-breaking to see, even as you know it is going to happen.
The whole charm of the film is that it is a Mockumentary conducted between a human and an animated shell that has legs and one big eye at its aperture. There is no explanation offered as to what type of creatures the shells are – they just are. What makes Marcel so adorable is that it – it is not clear if it is a he or a she, although it at least gets a male name – speaks with a small high-pitched child’s voice, but the voice is also not child-like – the dialogue throughout is naturalistic and Marcel speaks in a wryly self-reflective way, while having a wide-eyed innocent’s view of the human world.
Marcel the Shell With Shoes OnMarcel (r) and his grandmother Connie (l) in the garden
A great deal of the charms of Marcel the Shell With Shoes On are big and small ones – the idea of seeing a human-sized world converted into a home by creatures only an inch tall. Thus a sneaker on a clothesline is turned into a zipline; Marcel lives in a ‘breadroom’ where his bed is literally two slices of bread; a tennis ball becomes a runaway travelling ball; they have created gardens for themselves where Connie has managed to teach herself the basics by books tipped out of the library shelves; Marcel plays the Taps using an uncooked fusilli shell as a wind instrument; while the aging Connie uses a wine bottle muselet as walking frame and relaxes using a warm tea cup as a bath. Or just the charms of Marcel and Connie sitting in front of a laptop with YouTube open in front of them as though it was a seventy-foot cinema screen; or of Marcel hopping across the keypad of a cellphone to dial the numbers.
The film has a relatively light plot – it is just the Marcel videos finding an unexpected fame on YouTube (mirroring what the short films did in real life) and then an added quest of sorts for the couple that used to live in the house who hold the secret of reuniting Marcel with his family. The reuniting does occur rather abruptly at the end – I wasn’t sure if it meant the family had been hiding in the sock drawer all along or that they came back when the couple returned. Marcel the Shell With Shoes On however is a film that charms and wins you over without making a move wrong any step of the way.
On the basis of Marcel the Shell With Shoes On, Dean Fleischer Camp was hired to direct the upcoming live-action remake of Disney’s Lilo & Stitch (2025).
