Tiny Marcel the Shell makes it to big screen
Jenny Slate excited that voice she used to entertain friends has struck a chord
Jenny Slate and Dean FleischerCamp, co-creators of the new movie “Marcel the Shell With Shoes On,” remember being gobsmacked when their first three-minute DIY video of the film’s delightful title character became a YouTube sensation 12 years ago.
In the first of several stop-motion shorts they posted online from 2010 to 2014, viewers were introduced to the talkative, playful Marcel, an adorable 1-inch seashell with one googly eye and a child’s tiny, questioning voice (by Slate). With his pet piece of lint named Alan, and a torrent of observations about being small in a human-centric world, Marcel struck a chord with viewers of all ages.
“I seem to completely and constantly not understand how the internet works. Maybe that’s because I am frightened by it,” Slate (“Obvious Child,” “I Want You Back”) told The Chronicle by video call from Los Angeles in April, before her Bay Area visit to screen “Marcel” at the San Francisco International Film Festival.
During her local stop, she also received a career tribute at the SFFilm Festival for her increasingly wide-ranging accomplishments as a comedian, actor and writer. In 2019 Slate released an acclaimed Netflix stand-up special, “Stage Fright,” as well as her idiosyncratic bestselling book of essays, “Little Weirds.” She’s played everything onscreen from a scientist in the superhero movie “Venom” to a dog mom in the multiverse indie hit “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” But in explaining Marcel’s first taste of going viral, which became a major plot point in the new feature film, she shared that she is still surprised at Marcel’s reach, adding that of everything she has done, Marcel is the truest expression of her personality.
“We had our minds blown when we saw that 200 people had watched it,” she recalled.
That original video has now been viewed more than 32 million times.
Yet, Marcel’s origin story didn’t in any way suggest he would one day be the star of a theatrical release from prestige distributor A24. Back in 2010, Slate and Fleischer-Camp were creative and romantic partners (they’ve since divorced, and Slate has remarried) when they found themselves sharing a cramped hotel room with five male friends to save money while attending a wedding.
Slate was feeling low after being fired from “Saturday Night Live” after just one season as a cast member. As a naturally gifted voice actor (she’s a regular on “Bob’s Burgers” and “The Great North”) and a neat freak ruffled by sharing a messy room with so many men, she started talking to the guys in Marcel’s quivering and very funny little voice.
“The voice just came out,” she said. “It was so weird because at ‘SNL’ I had done every voice I could do to try to get attention, and it just wasn’t working. I felt used up, which is really sad to feel. I was being hard on myself, and so I started talking in this little voice. Then, I just kept doing it. It felt refreshing and affirming, being this character.”
“It cracked us up,” Fleischer-Camp confirmed during a separate inter
view by phone from Los Angeles.
Fleischer-Camp directed the new film, along with animation director Kirsten Lepore, and also appears onscreen as a documentary filmmaker who has rented a Los Angeles Airbnb and discovers he is sharing the space with a precocious shell, Marcel, and his grandmother Nana Connie (voiced by Isabella Rossellini). Marcel and Connie were once part of a thriving shell community but are the lone survivors of an unnamed tragedy in which their extended family disappeared.
Fleischer-Camp starts filming Marcel’s everyday life and abundant wit, introducing him to an online world of strangers who, for better and worse, can’t get enough of the tiny Marcel.
“Marcel” is a poignant meditation on loss and resilience that’s as silly as it is profound. The movie received rave reviews after its U.S. premiere at the Telluride Film Festival in September. It will arrive in theaters on Friday, July 1.
Fleischer-Camp said that after first hearing Slate’s Marcel voice, he remembered he had promised a friend a short video for his comedy show in Brooklyn. “So I ran out and bought a bunch of supplies from a craft store and started prototyping little creatures. Four or five were tremendously ugly, but I happened to be reading a book about the science of cuteness, and how there are cross-cultural visual cues that we’ve evolved to recognize, like wideset eyes and a head that’s disproportionate to the body.
“How much wider can you get than a shell, and how much more wide-set than only one eye?” he said, laughing.
Cobbled together in just 48 hours, the first video of Marcel, in which Fleischer-Camp interviewed Slate in character, landed as “uncharacteristically heartwarming” on the Brooklyn crowd. When it was apparent that even jaded hipsters liked Marcel, and it took off online, Hollywood came calling.
Slate and FleischerCamp “took a lot of meetings with big studios,” he recalled. “But they’re not really interested in hearing your vision for a quiet documentary portrait of Marcel the Shell. They’re more, ‘Let’s pair him with Ryan Reynolds and they’ll fight crime together’ ” or ‘Punch up his cuteness to better target the movie to young kids.’
“It became clear to me,” Fleischer-Camp said, “that to expand Marcel’s world in a way that was holistic with what we’d already created, it would be a much longer road.”
Seven years later, with funding from directorfriendly nonprofit Cinereach and their passion project finally opening in theaters, both creators agreed they “love the idea of people walking into a movie with zero expectations, sort of the way you would have in the early days of movies,” he said.
Each of them stressed that the themes in “Marcel,” our need for community and how keenly we feel its loss when it’s missing, only ring truer now, in 2022, after the world has suffered a pandemic. It’s a message that lands with real emotional weight on young people as well as adults.
“I was a stressed-out little person,” said Slate, who now has a toddler daughter with her artistwriter husband Ben Shattuck. “When I was little and my grandparents would leave our house to drive back home, I would sometimes cry because I would get so sad that maybe one day they would not be alive.
“Kids need to have the opportunity to feel sadness in a way that’s safe, to have a hospitable environment to be sad within and not freaked out like so many adults are. Because, you know, adults are only exploded versions of themselves as children.”