Review: Marcel the Shell with Shoes On (Dean Fleischer-Camp, 2021)

Fig. 1 - Poster for feature film, Marcel The Shell with Shoes On (2021) - where he reuses a tootsie roll pop wrapper.

The extraordinary life of Marcel, a one-inch tall talking shell, first began with three Youtube shorts in the early 2010s. He took the Internet by a storm: Jenny Slate’s crackling timbre, coupled with Dean Fleischer-Camp’s comically awkward script, drew over 31 million views. Now, after more than a decade of slumber, the shorts finally resurfaced, though this time in feature form. At the Telluride Film Festival last year, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On (Dean Fleischer-Camp, 2021) captured the hearts – and tears – of audiences in the cozy Colorado ski town. Press notably cooled down over a particularly competitive fall festival season, however, as the stop motion film faded behind the annual Oscar buzz. But after a November agreement with indie distribution company A24, Marcel the Shell has been building up momentum towards its 2022 comeback. With another screening at SXSW, several more spring festival exhibitions, and now a specialized rollout in US theatres in June of this year (and a wider release in July), Marcel the Shell slid into the top ten films in North America as of this week.

The appeal – and the premise – of Marcel the Shell is fairly straightforward. The part-live-action, part-stop-motion mockumentary follows the googly-eyed, grape-sized shell Marcel, whose life appears blissfully simple (Fig. 1). He lives in a handsome, three-story suburban home that doubles as an Airbnb, and it is here where he and his aged Nana (Isabella Rossellini) garden and explore. They fill their time with hobbies and adventure to make up for the gap that their abducted family left behind. Their lives take a turn, however, when a new, long-term human resident, Dean (played by director Dean Fleischer-Camp), notices their micro-lives in a corner of the home.He promises to help find their family. He just needs some footage first.

So he records Marcel. Funnily enough, the storyline of the 2022 feature hinges upon this 2010 moment. Dean argues that uploading his documentary will help Marcel find his family; the citizens of the Internet, he suggests, can contribute to their open-source search. Marcel – at first tentative, and then enthusiastic – agrees. Like the original series, then, Dean captures his interactions with Marcel through interviews, with Marcel asking all the questions. “Guess what my bed is?” Marcel goads. “What?” Dean asks. “A piece of bread.” Dean laughs; Marcel exhibits. The camera keeps rolling. In each interaction, the delight is palatable. Marcel’s genius reflects that of his own animators – Dean as character, Dean as director, Jenny Slate, and all.

In this way, the feature pays a stunningly nested homage to its roots. Some jokes from the videos (like this bread one) get recycled onto the silver screen. Diegetically, they play into Dean’s larger documentary premise; self-reflexively, they also gently stir the viewer’s memory. Unlike the anonymous cinematographer in the 2010s though, 2021 Dean demands more presence. He’s no longer a bemused photographer, but instead a central character; he’s fleshed out with varying degrees of vulnerability. He’s looking for a job. He’s just left his girlfriend’s place. He’s only really got two things going on in this temporary stay – his camera and his dog.

Fig. 2 - Nana and Marcel sitting before the computer that made them famous.

Dean’s precarity inspires a sense of suspicion among the audience. Does Dean really act of goodwill? Or does he have a sneaking, ulterior motive? Is he taking advantage of Marcel’s naivete? After all, this short could make Dean famous. This short could help him find a job. This short could at least help him gain an additional income stream – a relatively new phenomenon in Youtube stardom. The simple act of uploading the video feels like an advertisement not just for Marcel’s family search, but for Dean, too. The socially invisible – that is, both Marcel and Dean – could now become hyper-visible (Fig. 2).

When view count does skyrocket, then, it feels like the two are on the fast-track to Internet fame. This feels like the influencer dream, or, as poet-professor Susan Stewart might say, a miniature’s daydream. In her aesthetic description of the miniature in On Longing, she notes that the simultaneous rise of children’s literature and the miniature book encourage a “reverie” (1984, 43). Child-sized objects, like toys, are poignant examples in this regard. Their very size suggests a multitude of use contexts; they function according to the rules of both the micro- and macro world. This, she claims, “is the daydream of the microscope: the daydream of life inside of life, of significance multiplied infinitely within significance” (Stewart 1984, 54). The miniature exists as an altern. 

Beyond Marcel’s newfound celebrity, he does seem to live a dream-like life. His suburban, single-home unit is always spick-and-span and safe. Though Marcel lives at the mercy of his giant co-habitants, he does not have the same constraints. Capital, let alone labour, does not define his living conditions; he, unlike Dean, does not have to pay the bills. Instead, Marcel “works” as a whimsical manifestation of a full-time, capital-C Creative. He fills his days with thinking, inventing, and tinkering with his surroundings. His artistic solitude seems like a form of solace. 

Strikingly, Marcel’s inventiveness does not stem from his ability to create new content per se, or to conceive other like-sized devices. Instead, his quiet brilliance manifests in refashioning adult-sized materials. A leaking pot of honey promises a fun wall-climb. A blender can shake fruit off a tree. A dusty tabletop doubles as an ice-skating rink. Stewart further extrapolates upon the separate dollhouse, metonymic of the larger property (1984, 63; 69). To Marcel though, the entire BnB is his dollhouse. He, a toy-sized object, can make his own toys out of human-sized ones. Everything can be anything in Marcel’s home. 

Like the feature mirrors the short, Marcel’s creation reflects his own materiality. Stop motion, after all, is infamous for re-appropriating banal objects for its own means. A sheet of plastic can mimic a rippling wave; a smile can replace a grimace in clay. They demand the imagination on part of the audience. One must believe that the plastic is water; one must believe that the clay figure is a human face. In Marcel the Shell, however, Fleischer-Camp invites his audiences to take a step back. Marcel’s innovations are less about the home-made rather than the home-found. The honey is still honey; the blender is still a blender. We don’t have to imagine them as mysteriously imbued with life. Through Marcel’s displays of innovation, Fleischer-Camp self-reflexively asks his audiences to delight in the silliness of stop motion.

As a result, the film is peppered not so much with awe than it is sheer delight. Marcel is captivating not because he riffs on his homemade gadgets, but because he acknowledges them for the found objects that they are. This unique mode of (re)invention is not necessarily limited to stop motion, but certainly is evident in the advent of animation. Studio Ghibli’s The Secret World of Arrietty (Hiromasa Yonebayashi, 2010) is another good example. Here, Arrietty also lives in relative seclusion. Her family is the last of a Lilliputian species called the Borrowers, harkening back to Mary Norton’s 1952 children’s book. Like Marcel, they too live a rich life in a wealthy household; they reside underneath the floorboards of a spacious, country home. Simple throwaway items, like a sewing needle and clothespin, become fashionable accoutrements for Arrietty. Sugar cubes last for weeks, and a bread crumb feeds the whole family. Just like Marcel, the Borrowers are nearly imperceptible.

Fig. 3 - Arrietty walking into a Victorian dollhouse.

Fig. 4 - Human family peering into the Victorian dollhouse, for scale.

The characters in Arrietty, however, effectively follow Stewart's prescribed poetics. Despite the occasional human-sized object, the Borrowers are largely self-sufficient. They are miniature humans with their own miniature residence; they even have miniature kettles and kegs, somehow molded by their no-longer existent community. Indeed, when Arrietty wanders into a Victorian dollhouse, she's incredulous at how everything seems to be made just for her (Fig. 3). The human-sized objects, then, are more for luxury than they are staples. They almost seem like they are more for us, the viewer. They serve as reference points for scale (Fig. 4).

The integration of human-sized objects and human-sized environments sets Marcel apart from Arrietty. In fact, the documentary aesthetic at work in the film seeks to allow audience to almost share Marcel’s space – inviting us not only into his home, but into our world. In this way, perhaps Marcel is more akin to other animated series where smaller folk live with the big. Think The Borrowers (Peter Hewitt, 1997) Stuart Little (Rob Minkoff, 1999), and Ratatouille (Brad Bird, 2007) rather than Toy Story (John Lasseter, 1995) or A Bug’s Life (John Lasseter, 1998): the miniature not only co-exists, but indeed plays an essential role to (physically) larger social ecosystems.

Marcel’s involvement in our world rather than his own is, however, both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, he has access to our sense of time. Though the months and years might be lost on him, measured time certainly isn't. He and Nana religiously watch Lesley Stahl's 60 Minutes at 7pm every Sunday; they also age with the passage of time. On the other hand, outside forces push the borders of Marcel’s dreamworld a little too far. When Lesley Stahl herself shows up at his house, his daily regimen is suddenly thrown off-kilter. Disaster lurks around the corner, threatening to disturb the idyll fancy into nightmare. Is it better to animate the banal? Or is it better to leave it as is?

Marcel the Shell doesn't quite give an answer, but then again, it's difficult to. Everything seems clear and confusing at once in this ode to love and loss. The boundaries between the miniature dreamworld and the human lifeworld have blurred; stop motion and live-action confuse the docu-mocku-mentary rationale. In this timely, self-reflexive film, one is sure to laugh and cry at once. Fleischer-Camp directs a touching film for all ages, wherein the gravity of death falls upon the cuteness of animated miniature. So when the film closes – the credits roll, the lights stutter on, and the audience rustles in their seats – a sense of melancholy lingers. We wake like Marcel, rubbing the sleep from our eyes. The daydream of the animated everyday ends for us to face an unknown dawn.

**Article published: July 15, 2022**

References

Stewart, Susan. 1984. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Biography

Grace Han (she/her) is a PhD candidate in Art History at Stanford University and is the current Film/TV Reviews Editor for Fantasy/Animation. Previously, she received the Society for Animation Studies' Best Student Paper Award (2019), and has written for Fantasy/Animation, Hyperallergic, Asian Movie Pulse, Cineuropa, Koreanscreen.com, and more. She likes to stay home in her free time.