Expanding his series of online animated shorts, Dean Fleischer Camp introduces movie audiences to their unlikely hero: a plucky, curious, and big-hearted talking shell. Camp, who plays himself offscreen, is a documentarian named Dean who rents a house on Airbnb after splitting up with his girlfriend. As he licks his wounds, he realizes that he’s not alone.
In the hidden corners of the house, Marcel (played with childish innocence by Jenny Slate) calmly goes about his business.
At only an inch tall, the clever one-eyed mollusk can use a record player for a walker, a tennis ball for transportation, and can scale walls by applying drops of honey to the soles of its tiny shoes.
The unprotected little mollusk also desperately needs someone to talk to. The man and woman who own the house separated and left two years ago and, due to an oversight in emptying a sock drawer, the man took most of Marcel’s mollusc community with him.
Now the only shells in the house are Marcel and his grandmother Connie (voiced by Isabella Rossellini), who is struggling with the early stages of dementia.
Dean, surprisingly unfazed by his discovery, begins filming a documentary on Marcel that goes viral.
For the first half hour or so, I feared that this handmade oddity might get unbearably cheesy. But after a while, I stopped admiring the animation and was completely captivated by the characters.
Marcel and Dean’s friendship and Marcel’s love for his ailing grandmother feel very real, as do the threats the human world poses to this fragile little boy.
In the end, I was totally on board with the idea of talking about shells with footwear attached. If this wins the Oscar for Best Animated Feature, will Marcel take the podium to accept it?
- Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, Cert PG, Now in Theaters
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