Marcel the Shell With Shoes On
**Seen at the 2022 Atlanta Film Festival.
Whatever you think you are going to get from Dean Fleischer-Camp’s feature-length expansion of his short film about a shell in shoes, I promise you, it is not what you get. I’ve never seen the original shorts, but in 90 minutes, we get one of the richest, most entertaining explorations of humanity and mortality film has delivered in recent memory.
Immediately, from the time we meet Marcel (voiced beautifully by Jenny Slate) and his grandmother (the incomparable Isabella Rossellini), we don’t question the reality of not only why this shell has shoes, but is having his life documented by a filmmaker (Fleischer-Camp). The house Marcel and his grandmother live in is an Air BNB house, rented out after the previous occupants left it. Marcel has managed to make a good, full life with his grandmother, but something is missing, and as Dean documents things, we find that out.
First and foremost, this is a comedy. You will laugh plenty throughout this film’s running time, not only in situational moments, and how Marcel and his grandmother utilize things we don’t expect, but in the dialogue between Marcel and Dean. I’m not just talking about lines that sound funny given the circumstances of the world, but the ways in which Marcel sometimes is more logical in his thinking than Dean is. These two make a great on-screen tandem.
The stop-motion animation in this film is a thing of beauty- naturalistic but also imaginative. We believe the characters, so much so that, when the emotions come, it is simply the other side of this film’s emotional coin. At its core, this film is about family, needing people to connect with, and making sure people are alright on their own. The waterworks fell hard during this film.
One of my favorite moments is when Dean is doing an outside shoot from a tree. The next door neighbor tells him to get out of the tree- it’s actually his tree, and he doesn’t know what’s going on. That second part is hilarious; after all, has he not noticed the people coming around the house recently? The rest of us have, and while I understand the risk involved, I still would have let Dean continue to shoot from the tree. What he’s doing is too special to not let his vision get impeded by outside voices. Marcel deserves it.
