![]() In between shots of Connie tending her garden and Marcel watching his favorite show (“60 Minutes”) on a comfy hot-dog-bun chair, a story about loss and separation quietly coalesces in the background. While most guests take little notice of the sentient shells in their midst, one rare exception is a documentary filmmaker named Dean (Camp, playing himself in a mostly off-screen role), who moves in for an extended stay and soon after begins filming his new friends and their singular way of life. (While it retains its handcrafted feel, the animation is definitely slicker Marcel’s conch-shell body, with its smooth surface and croissant swirls, catches the light beautifully.) The filmmakers have also preserved the comic wonderment of Marcel’s shell-out-of-water existence and devised several ingenious life hacks for him, the cleverest of which are an electric-mixer-powered tree shaker (he eats a lot of fruit) and a moving vehicle fashioned from a hollow tennis ball.Ĭrucially, if a little more obviously, they’ve also given Marcel a motivational backstory - one that explains why he lives alone with his beloved grandmother, Nana Connie (marvelously voiced by Isabella Rossellini), in a comfy house turned popular Airbnb rental. But Camp and Slate have made shrewd choices all around, starting with their commitment to stop-motion animation, seamlessly integrated here with live-action imagery, often in the same shot. The shorts were charming, if also as appreciably modest and small-scaled as Marcel himself.Ī feature-length expansion posed any number of challenges, including the possibility that Marcel, however irresistible he might be in four-minute chunks, might overstay his welcome at 90. He’s proud but not arrogant, scattered but thoughtful, a tireless talker and a good listener he’s aware of his unique obstacles in life but happily allergic to self-pity. You do learn, however, that he uses a raisin as a beanbag chair and a Dorito as a hang glider. Watching the shorts, you learn almost nothing about Marcel’s background or the mystery of how he came to walk, talk, live and breathe, which is probably for the best. Because moviegoing carries risks during this time, we remind readers to follow health and safety guidelines as outlined by the CDC and local health officials. The Times is committed to reviewing theatrical film releases during the COVID-19 pandemic. ![]() (Those are the same videos we see being uploaded to YouTube here.) Marcel first came to fame in 2010, anchoring a series of stop-motion animated shorts, each one touching lightly on the challenges of being a very tiny creature in very large human-made environs. But it’s also a sly meta-joke, since internet fame is, of course, the reason this calculated charmer of a movie exists in the first place. It’s a shrewd bit of preemptive self-critique on the part of the filmmakers (Dean Fleischer Camp directed the movie and co-wrote the script with Slate and Nick Paley), who are perhaps keenly aware that Marcel, cute as a button and nearly as small, could trigger your gag reflex if left unchecked. As he scrolls through inane YouTube comments (“‘So cute’ … ugh!”) and watches fame seekers take selfies outside his window, Marcel longs for his days of obscurity, when he and his family could dwell at a relatively peaceful remove from the human world. Marcel - a garrulous 1-inch-tall seashell with one googly eye, two Creamsicle-colored sneakers and the burbling voice of the actor-comedian Jenny Slate - learns this firsthand when a few short videos about his life go unexpectedly viral, earning him the adoration of a less-than-adorable fan base. One of the harsher lessons of “Marcel the Shell With Shoes On,” an otherwise winsome bit of family-friendly whimsy, is the high price of internet stardom.
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