Certificate: PG (mild upsetting scenes, rude humour, infrequent drug references). Running Time: 90 mins. UK Distributor: Universal Pictures
WHO’S IN IT?
Jenny Slate, Dean Fleischer Camp, Isabella Rossellini, Rosa Salazar, Thomas Mann, Lesley Stahl, Shari Finkelstein, Sarah Thyre, Andy Richter, Nathan Fielder, Jessi Klein, Peter Bonerz, Jamie Leonhart, Jesse Cillio
WHO’S BEHIND THE CAMERA?
Dean Fleischer Camp (director, writer, producer, editor), Jenny Slate (writer, producer), Nick Paley (writer, editor), Andrew Goldman, Elisabeth Holm, Caroline Kaplan, Terry Leonard and Paul Mezey (producers), Disasterpeace (composer), Eric Adkins and Bianca Cline (cinematographers)
WHAT’S IT ABOUT?
A tiny young shell (Slate) in search of his family becomes an online sensation…
WHAT ARE MY THOUGHTS ON MARCEL THE SHELL WITH SHOES ON?
One of the many, many powers of film is getting the audience to sympathise with characters who also happen to be inanimate objects. From toys to trees to food to even houses, there have been plenty of movies where non-living things have been granted souls and personalities of their very own, so to see one be given to a one-inch shell is nothing too out of the ordinary – what is unique, though, about Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, from director and co-writer Dean Fleisher Camp, is how much soul and personality has been poured into it, to where you’d have to be an irredeemable cynic to not catch even a small particle of its charm.
The film is a feature-length version of a collection of online animated shorts that Camp and co-creator Jenny Slate (who also voices the titular Marcel in both the shorts and the film) put onto YouTube and gained a small fanbase with. Like the shorts, the film is told in a mockumentary format, with Camp (playing a fictional version of himself) encountering the young, shoe-wearing shell Marcel and his ailing grandmother Nana Connie (Isabella Rossellini) in an empty Airbnb house he’s renting after getting a divorce. As it turns out, Marcel and Connie were once part of a much larger community of anthropomorphic shells, but were separated from them after the house’s previous owners (Thomas Mann and Rosa Salazar) unintentionally took the others with them, leaving the young mollusc with only his aging grandmother for close company. When Dean begins filming Marcel’s life and uploads the resulting footage to YouTube, Marcel becomes an unexpected online sensation, and hopes that his newfound fame can potentially lead to his family being tracked down so he can finally be reunited with them.
Like Marcel himself, the film is a fragile and delicate little thing – one false move, or a single touch too forceful, and the entire thing would come crumbling down in a matter of seconds. However, the strength of Camp’s direction and script (co-written with Slate and the film’s editor Nick Paley) is that it knows exactly how far to take itself without feeling too cloying or sentimental; the sad moments are allowed to be sad, the funny moments are allowed to be funny, and so on until there isn’t an emotion that hasn’t been utilised within its set limitations. It manages to be quite effective as a result, because these characters feel very well-defined and capable of winning you over without trying too hard, leaving you really wanting things to work out for them and that they get the happy ending they deserve. It lets you reach those feelings organically without feeling as though it’s being manipulative, and gently guides you towards a number of bittersweet emotions that are well and truly earned by its soft, soothing pace.
There are also plenty of impressive filmmaking techniques used to blend the stop-motion animation with the much larger live-action environments, some of which you’ll be wondering how exactly they achieved what they did. Since a number of characters and props in this movie are animated (including Marcel, his grandmother, the items that they touch and use throughout, and even some of the garden insects they encounter), almost if not entirely by hand rather than using CGI, which then have to not only be transplanted in front of real locations and people, but also with the mockumentary format adding handheld camera shots and out-of-focus framing on top of them, it’s fascinating how it all comes together so seamlessly. Stop-motion animation is already an extremely difficult medium to pull off, especially with all these extra layers it has to work with, but Camp and the team of animators and visual effects artists who worked on this film deserve a good amount of credit for making the creation of such a unique blend seem so effortless.
However, the methods rarely ever distract from the sweet and heartfelt story being told. In a way, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On reminds me of an early Pixar film (specifically from the first Toy Story up to and including Finding Nemo), where the emotional range is so high and astoundingly universal that you often forget what a technical achievement it also is, with moments both funny and heart-breaking landing exactly where they need to land, and three-dimensional characters that are impossible to hate due to their instant lovability. I can see most families getting just as much out of it as they would from many of the Pixar movies, though perhaps some of its drier and daintier style of humour may go over the heads of some younger viewers, while the mockumentary style might take some getting used to for children that may be unfamiliar with it. Other than that, I feel that this is a perfectly good film that anyone of any age can watch and get something from it, whether you’re a kid who gets giggles from some of the sillier sights (Marcel travels around the house in a tennis ball, and has a piece of lint he treats like a pet), or an adult who can appreciate the mature themes about loneliness, family, online shallowness, and old-age. There’s even something for regular viewers of the American news broadcast show 60 Minutes, as both it and regular host Lesley Stahl factor quite heavily into the plot at one point.
In one fell swoop, the adorable Marcel joins Woody and Buzz, Wilson the volleyball, Groot, and all the others that have come before him in the annals of cinema’s greatest inanimate objects, but Marcel the Shell with Shoes On is also a film with exceptional heart and sophistication that has the power to charm and emotionally resonate with audiences who, against their better judgement, can cry over a tiny shell that is somehow wearing a nice pair of shoes.
SO, TO SUM UP…
Marcel the Shell with Shoes On is a charming and emotional live-action/stop-motion hybrid that effortlessly blends both mediums together in impressive fashion, but its technical skills do not distract from a mature and heartfelt story with lovable characters that many viewers of any age can easily connect with and find something valuable to take away from it.
