9/3/2023 0 Comments Googly eyesHow much sensation a shell can handle is part of the story of “Marcel the Shell.” But it’s more about preserving, in the face of heartache and self-doubt, a childlike appreciation for the littlest things in life. After Dean posts clips of Marcel on YouTube that garner millions of views, fame comes a little uncomfortably for Marcel. “She blows cases wide open,” explains Marcel. He and Connie, for example, are huge fans of Lesley Stahl on “60 Minutes,” and watch regularly. Marcel’s unpredictable references and tastes are part of his charm. One comes from the athlete Marcel calls “Whale Jetski”: “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” And, like an imaginative child, Marcel likes the attention, constantly showing Dean little tricks of being small and eagerly sharing a steady stream of non-sequitur thoughts and motivational slogans. They have passed unnoticed until a documentary filmmaker, Dean (Camp) moves in and begins filming Marcel. In the film, which takes the same sunny spirit and loose mockumentary style of the shorts, Marcel lives largely out of sight in a California home with his gardening grandmother, Connie (Isabella Rossellini, an all-time great bit of voice casting). When he wants to get around quicker, he uses his “rover,” a tennis ball with a hole to climb into. He uses a mixer tied to a branch to shake fruit from a tree outside the window. The sight of the housecleaner - “the harbinger of the vacuum” - is one example of concern. To Marcel, there’s great joy and pride in getting around as a little guy, and only occasional trepidation. The experience of being small, and knee-weakeningly cute, is much at the heart of “Marcel the Shell,” very possibly the sweetest movie ever made about a mollusk. It’s a leap in scale that Marcel, who sleeps on a slice of bread and plays “Taps” through a macaroni, would probably appreciate, himself. “Marcel the Shell With Shoes On,” which opens Friday in theaters, is a feature-length, stop-motion animation film based on the YouTube shorts made by Jenny Slate, who voices Marcel with a snuggly high pitch, and director Dean Fleischer Camp. He introduces himself as a shell, “but I also have shoes and a face.” Marcel is an inch-tale seashell with a single googly eye, a pair of Polly Pocket shoes and a very big heart. Within months of “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” the metaphysical sci-fi comedy whose panoply of metaverses memorably included one that made magic out of a pair of stones and some plastic eyeballs, arrives “Marcel the Shell With Shoes On.”
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