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The Tiniest Movie Star After years of hard work, Marcel the Shell gets to shine in a wonderful feature-length movie. By Ramin Zahed
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n August of 2010, director Dean Fleischer-Camp and his then-wife, writer/actress Jenny Slate, released a lovely stop-motion short about an anthropomorphic seashell with a single googly eye and very tiny shoes. Now, 12 years later, the super-cute mollusk is ready for his big-screen close-up as the feature-length hybrid movie Marcel the Shell with Shoes On premieres in select theaters in June. The film, which made a big splash at the 2021 Telluride Festival, finds the squeaky-voiced seashell, his grandmother Connie and their pet lint Alan trying to figure out the mysterious tragedy that separated them for the rest of their community. Fleischer-Camp tells us that after the initial Marcel short proved to be hugely popular — to date, it has over 3.4 million views on YouTube — it generated a lot of interest from studios and networks. But, there was a catch: “All the meetings were all sort of geared towards how to take this great character and just kind of graft it onto a more mainstream, familiar type of movie,” he recalls. “So, a lot of studio execs suggesting, ‘What if we pair Marcel with Ryan Reynolds and they fight crime together?’ It was
basically Detective Pikachu, now that I think about it. It just didn’t feel aligned with what made the short great, or with what I was interested in doing with the character.” So, the director and Slate (who also provides Marcel’s voice) decided to keep the character intact for a while. “But the character never went away, and Jenny and I just kind of kept joking and riffing
about it in private, thinking up stories or jokes or whatever,” says Fleischer-Camp. “I started keeping very lazy notes about those ideas and just got into the habit of jotting them down. And eventually, we’d built up a ton of those. We had generated so much about him and his world that after a while, it honestly felt like it would be a shame not to put it into a larger project and kind of let it be free — you
‘It sounds corny but most of my animation heroes are the folks I met working on the film or through festivals. People like Kirsten Lepore, Kangmin Kim, Yizhou Li, so many others … That’s sort of the best thing about being a director: You get to meet and befriend so many brilliant artists — and if you’re really lucky, like I was, you get to work with them as well.’ — Director & co-writer Dean Fleischer-Camp
www.animationmagazine.net 32
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june|july 22
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