Not since the original “Toy Story” has a movie found such magic in the mundane as Dean Fleischer Camp’s “Marcel the Shell with Shoes On.” This feature-length adaptation of the popular YouTube short series is more than just storytelling – it’s a new way of experiencing the world around us. The film discovers compassion and caring hidden amidst the clutter of everyday life rather than just chaos. “I don’t do the clock the way you guys do the clock,” humbly observes Marcel, and the film invests the time to train its audience to reset their understanding of time and space to mirror its protagonist’s.
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The way in which the stop-motion, snail-shell spirit guide locates the possibility and potential in every piece of household detritus proves unexpectedly and ecstatically empowering. It’s not that the viral videos did not contain their own charms, of course. But the rapid-fire pace of editing necessary to break through online has the effect of reducing the character into a delivery mechanism for pithy laugh lines. Within the more languid confines of a full feature, the character can transcend the twee and cut right to the heart.
The fear of not losing the audience’s attention on a second-by-second basis liberates Camp to create a space more in keeping with the ethos of the character. With the freedom to linger in Marcel’s milieu, the camera highlights how Marcel’s can-do spirit spawned such resourceful repurposing of human refuse. The wire muselet cages from champagne corks become chairs and the tabs from canned drinks become benches. He converts an elbow pasta noodle into a shofar and harnesses the power of the sun through a magnifying glass to make popcorn. There are seemingly no bounds to the imagination of “Marcel the Shell with Shoes On.” And, true to the humility of the character, the film declines self-congratulatory displays of its own ingenuity.
However, there’s more to the movie than just a tiny house tour. Befitting a full feature, Camp along with co-screenwriters Nick Paley and Jenny Slate expand beyond fragmented factoids. It’s never belabored, but there is leisurely forward motion to the film as Marcel seeks a reunion with his long-lost family beyond his grandma, Nan (voice of Isabella Rosselini). The meandering progress toward the goal is not a fault but a feature of “Marcel the Shell with Shoes On.” This film is designed to remain anchored in the power of the present, appreciating all the little miracles hiding in plain sight.
If there’s anything held over from Marcel’s origins in the snackable video format, it’s that the emotional beats still track to a roughly three-minute cycle. The structure still builds using that basic story unit, unpacking an idea or feeling Marcel experiences only to cut to black and largely restart again. It has the effect of making “Marcel the Shell with Shoes On” a film of moments, not momentum.
But Jenny Slate, the soul of the project, provides the cohesion necessary to bring all the pieces together to ensure the film does not just feel like a supersized YouTube playlist. There’s a reason she seems contractually obligated to appear in any animated movie with anthropomorphic animals over the last decade. Slate has a unique gift for finding the kernel of humanity in the non-human and then supersizing it to a hilarious and heartwarming effect. Yet here, she works in the opposite direction with her breathy and soft-spoken shell.
Slate can conjure the same effect as wide-eyed Pixar characters using just the slightest vocal modulation: a reversion to childlike wonder and innocence at the vastness of the universe. She never needs to resort to cloying for the desired effect, either. Her lightness of touch, perfectly befitting a miniature and modest mollusk, allows the character great leeway to sway in the film’s gentle tonal breeze. Marcel can be mirthful and then melancholic without needing some kind of grand character arc or external stimulus. She imbues a full spectrum of emotion into her tiny stop-motion figure, and it never loses intelligibility for viewers of any age in compression. In case there was any doubt, “Marcel the Shell with Shoes On” solidifies Jenny Slate’s status as one of the preeminent vocal artists working today.
In an age of multiverses, it feels nothing short of miraculous to have a film that can find the marvels within miscellanea. “Marcel the Shell with Shoes On” locates a world of wonder inside our drawers, under our noses, within our grasp – and enables viewers with the tools to both access and appreciate it. [B+]
“Marcel the Shell with Shoes On” arrives in theaters on June 24.