Marcel The Shell with Shoes On: A Man and Mollusk in a Therapeutic Bond

By Liam Lacey

Rating: B

The character of Marcel the Shell was born as a three-and-a-half minute YouTube video in 2010, from the brains of comedian Jenny Slate and her then-husband, filmmaker Dean Fleisher-Camp.

The character is neither a human, a pet nor a toy but a tchotchke, a decorative shell with a single googly eye and little shoes attached. Despite this, he has a voice and the consciousness of an inquisitive child, speaking in a raspy, quavering little-boy’s voice, provided by Slate.

He's a simple soul given to wise thoughts beyond his mollusk years: “I want to have a good life and to stay alive and not just survive but have a good life,” he says earnestly.

My own inner child-nerd wanted to protest. “But you’re already dead! You’re an exoskeleton desecrated with a felt eye and glued-on doll shoes.” But that would be missing the point of this gentle, self-consciously therapeutic exploration of childlike resilience.

Marcel is as sweet as the honey he uses to apply to his feet to climb walls, and as warm as the two slices of bread he uses as a mattress in his “breadroom” and as cute as the ball of lint, attached to a hair, that he calls his dog.

We first meet the one-inch Marcel in the hallway of a house when he steps out of a rolling tennis ball, which he calls his “rover,” one of many ingenious adaptations he has made from small objects in the Air B&B where he lives. The house is where a heartbroken filmmaker (Fleisher-Camp) has arrived following the end of a relationship, and finds, in this cast-off trinket, a correlative of his own wounded child.

Marcel lives with his loving grandmother Connie (voiced by Isabella Rossellini), who spends most of her time in her garden in an abandoned wheelbarrow and is suffering from dementia.

The rest of the shell “community,” as Marcel calls them, were torn apart when the couple split up, and the other shells, hiding in the sock drawer, were taken away by the husband. In its Lilliputian way, then, the film is about many kinds of loss: A bitter divorce, the historical destruction of communities, the loss of memory and eventually death.

The whole film suggests a shut-in’s reverie, claustrophobic in a way that echoes the COVID isolation of the past couple of years.

There was a lot of that “the film we need now” commentary when Marcel screened at the Telluride festival last fall, as if we all need the same thing, which is overselling it. At times, the film is unabashedly cloying, like a ASMR Forest Gump or a Minion with sensitivity training.

But if you can get past that, there’s an admirable ingenuity to the technique, integrating live action and stop-motion with humour and an easy, natural flow. The story of Marcel the Shell was created through guided improv by Fleischer-Camp, Slate, and co-writer Nick Paley, resulting in casual, playful conversations between the on-screen filmmaker, Marcel and grandmother, Connie. Rossellini’s reassuring, warm voice helps ground the story in more than pathos and whimsy.

In stretching the YouTube short to a 90-minute feature, the filmmakers decided to take a “meta” turn, a not particularly original commentary on the artificial community of social media. After shooting his short film about Marcel, the filmmaker posts it on YouTube, where it goes viral.

Fans seek out Marcel’s home, hide in trees to take pictures, and force Fleischer-Camp to cover the windows with sheets of newspaper, potentially stressing the fragile grandmother, Connie.

The public exposure gives Marcel a chance to track down his missing shell family. The Shells, we learn, were avid followers of the CBS newsmagazine show 60 Minutes (I’m guessing they identified with the wrinkles).

Fleischer-Camp and Marcel are delighted when the show’s host, Leslie Stahl, calls to say she wants to do a segment on the Marcel phenomenon and perhaps help to find the rest of the missing Shell family. Stahl’s cameo, in which she lavishly praises the Marcel story for showing us about the importance of family and community, is far more of an explanatory insertion than is required.

I’d hate to think a movie about a one-inch shell was talking down to us.

Marcel the Shell with Shoes On. Directed by Dean Fleischer-Camp. Written by Dean Fleischer-Camp, Jenny Slate and Nick Paley. Starring Jenny Slate, Dean Fleischer-Camp, Isabella Rossellini, and Lesley Stahl. Opens in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver on July 1 and other major cities on July 15.