Marcel the Shell With Shoes On
Dean Fleischer Camp, 2021, USA, Colour, 90 mins, Certificate: PG
Two of the best films of our early, post pandemic era are two wonderfully adult stop motion animations that tackle loss, (chosen) family love, and redemption, with a big smile, fearless humor and generous imagination.
This miraculous cinematic adventure of the diminutive in stature, but giant at heart, Marcel the Shell – one of the most endearing characters you will ever meet is one of them (the other being Netflix’s and Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio). And it found its way to its natural habitat, the big screen, for a precious little time.
So this is your change to experience it as it should be experienced.
An extraordinary hybrid of stop motion animation and live action, it is the 7 years in the making feature film expansion of the series of shorts co-created by Dean Fleischer Cam and -Marcel’s voice- Jenny Slate that took YouTube by storm a decade ago.
Filmed twice, once for the live action bits and once for the motion capture (on average, one full day of filming resulted in 5-10 seconds of footage!) it tells the story of Marcel that lives alone with his grandmother, Connie (Isabella Rossellini), after the sudden, mass disappearance of the rest of their beloved community. When he meets the human documentary filmmaker (Fleischer Cam), who moves into the house that houses his home, he agrees to be the subject of his next film as a way to locate his long lost family, and through a series of interviews, he unexpectedly becomes a viral sensation!
You won’t want to miss meeting Marcel, or the ethereal, charcoal beings of local artist’s Leo Crane’s stop motion short, L’ Amour Rebelle that we will start our evening with.
A very special cinematic evening indeed.
Reviews:
“Ultimately, Marcel’s clever creators reward our willingness to believe he and his world are real, while offering an opportunity to look at our own world from a different perspective.” Courtney Howard, AV Club
“ With Slate, his co-creator, co-writer and ex-partner, director Dean Fleischer Camp charts a world in which a semi-orphaned talking shell not only makes perfect sense, but becomes a perfect vessel to share painful, relatable truths about life. Dementia, loneliness and heartbreak are all writ large in Marcel’s world. ” Phil de Semlyen, Time Out
“Marcel the Shell With Shoes On is a film with much to offer when it comes to lessons and laughs. It even handles its primary themes about loss, grief and community with humor and grace, an approach that, these days, seems especially hard to find.” Lovia Gyarkye, The Hollywood Reporter
“Marcel The Shell With Shoes On performs a minor miracle of filmmaking. If a tiny talking invertebrate exoskeleton can make you cry, is there anything cinema can’t do? …Funny, profound, weird, sad, and gorgeously constructed — Marcel is a true original, liable to melt even the most cynical heart.” John Nugent, Empire