Marcel the Shell with Shoes On Review: A Whimsical Look at a Yearning Heart

Dean Fleischer Camp and Jenny Slate’s three-minute stop-motion short Marcel the Shell with Shoes On became a YouTube sensation back in 2010. Its concept was simple yet idiosyncratic enough to set the short and the two sequels that it prompted in 2011 and 2014 apart from the viral herd: An anthropomorphic mollusk (voiced by Slate) with one googly eye and pink sneakers is interviewed about his little life by a documentarian, Dean (played by Fleischer-Camp), who discovers the gregarious shell living in his apartment.

Much of the charm of the three shorts stems from Slate’s delightfully peculiar, warm-hearted voice work, which captures Marcel’s childlike delight in merely sharing the mundane details of his life, whether he’s showing off his “bread bed” or discussing the human toenails that he uses as skis. And yet, as adorable and amusing as the shorts are, nothing in their frivolous DNA suggests that Marcel was prepared to fully shoulder the load of carrying a feature film.

In a particularly shrewd move, the filmmakers, with the help of an additional screenwriter, Nick Paley, conceived of a feature that incorporates Marcel’s meteoric rise to fame into its narrative, allowing for the real-life popularity of the shorts to play into the fictional shell’s neuroses and personal growth. It’s a meta touch that helps establish the emotional core of the feature, allowing Marcel to transcend his one-dimensional characterization in the shorts.

Rather than picking up after the shorts, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On slightly alters Marcel’s origin story, having him living in a house, now used exclusively as an Airbnb, with his grandmother, Connie (Isabella Rossellini). It’s here that he meets Dean, a new guest who soon learns that, following a vicious breakup between Larissa (Rosa Salazar) and Mark (Thomas Mann), the former owners of the home, Marcel and Connie were left on their own after their friends and family were unknowingly packed up and taken to a new home.

The sorrow that Marcel feels in the wake of this incident colors his need for attention and showing off his random knowledge in a new light, and Dean’s fascination with documenting Marcel is matched by the shell’s deep-seated desire for friendship. Also opening up the world of the shorts is Connie, who gives Rossellini the chance to flaunt her singular sense of humor and comic timing—as displayed in her bizarre series of Green Porno shorts—as well as allows the audience to gain a deeper sense of the community that Marcel has lost.

Plenty of the film’s runtime is, like the shorts, devoted to Dean simply interviewing Marcel, and there are times where the fixation on all the things that Marcel does in an adorable manner simply because he’s such a little guy passes from amusing to cloying. But Connie’s presence serves to directly counteract this cutesiness. Her encroaching dementia, in particular, causes Marcel to grow increasingly protective of her and become more temperamental and emotionally complex, especially when both Dean and Connie lightly push him to do an interview with Leslie Stahl on his and his grandma’s favorite show, 60 Minutes.

The encroaching outside world, in the form of fans showing up on Marcel’s front lawn and the 60 Minutes crew that takes over his home for a day, may initially seem like an obvious attempt on the filmmakers’ part to expand the scope of Marcel the Shell to something more grand and “movie-sized.” But these nods to a world outside of Marcel’s micro-dominion endows his hardships and joys with a greater resonance and universality, even as the film retains the intimacy and small-scale pleasures of the shorts. Although its ending is too neat and abrupt, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On still convincingly proves that bigger sometimes is better.