when the first It’s a bit of a surprise that Marcel the Shell bears quickly went viral.As co-creator Jenny Slater told Seth Meyers this week late at night, her then-partner Dean Fleischer-Camp showed off the stop-motion animation they made on the 2010 comedy show, then posted it online at the request of an actor who wanted to show his sick mom. It became one of YouTube’s earliest sensations—Gangnam Style was still two years away, after all—and now, more than a decade later, its protagonist has his own movie, a tale of the internet dangers that made him famous. Movie.
Twelve years isn’t long in grand schemes, but in online time, it’s practically an eternity. It’s long enough that Slate and Fleischer-Camp have been able to shed some light on Marcel’s rise to fame. “It’s weird because of course I believe it 100 percent, but sometimes I can’t even be sure of it,” Slate said. She believes Marcel’s strengths lie in his size and his confidence, but admits that “people like to project their feelings onto him.”
So even though “Gangnam Style” came and went, Marcel was still loved. Fleischer-Camp said he and Slate once went on what he called a “water bottle tour” in Los Angeles, stopping at all the studios to talk about Marcel after he became famous. At the time, Fleischer-Camp said, “people were very interested in grafting Marcel onto a more familiar tentpole franchise template.” When they left those meetings, they knew they didn’t want Marcel to go little stuart or minions route. (However, they are working with film studio A24 to promote Marcel.) Ultimately, Fleischer-Camp thinks their commitment to independence paid off.
“For me, what makes Marcel special is not necessarily that he is so small,” he explained. “In fact, he doesn’t care how small he is. He has steel willpower and self-esteem, and he’s so conceited.”
Marcel’s cinematic world is both small and large. In the film, he and his Nana Connie (the stunning Isabella Rossellini) live in a colonial house that was once surrounded by not only their entire shells and shell-adjacent families And the community occupies, but also a human married couple. People never noticed that Marcel and his pals built a thriving community of houseplants, bread beds and meals made up of whatever they could find. One day, the married couple got into a big fight, and Marcel’s entire family, except his Nana, fled to the man’s sock drawer for safety. To get out of the house quickly, he threw all the contents of the drawers into a bag and ran away, never to return. Marcel’s family went with him, lost in the winds of Los Angeles.
That’s not to say Marcel is hopeless, because he isn’t. Marcel Shell Find out that he and his Nana have grown a thriving garden, developed clever food-gathering methods, and even kept up with their favorite show, 60 minutesIn a way, Fleischer-Camp says, his creative drive even inspired him. “When he hits an obstacle, he doesn’t think it’s impossible to overcome it,” explains Fleischer-Camp.
