Review: 'Marcel the Shell With Shoes On' delivers humor, wisdom and tears — all from an adorable one-inch mollusk

For a shell who’s only an inch tall, Marcel — the title character of the charming and deceptively light comedy “Marcel the Shell With Shoes On” — contains a whole lot of emotion, as he carries the weight of his tiny world.

In this cleverly conceived mix of live-action and stop-motion animation, we meet Marcel — voiced by Jenny Slate, who created the character with her now-ex-husband, Dean Fleischer Camp, the film’s director. Marcel is a shell with one googly eye on the right side of what, for lack of a better word, is his face. Marcel is mostly face, except for his shoes. 

Marcel lives in a usually empty house, an Airbnb, with his Nana Connie, who is voiced by Isabella Rossellini — it’s explained that “her people came over from the garage,” which is why she has an accent. They make do with what the house provides, augmented by Marcel’s many contraptions, such as the tennis ball he uses to roll quickly from room to room.

The current human occupant of the house, Dean (played by Fleischer Camp), is a soon-to-be-divorced filmmaker who decides to interview Marcel and post videos of the shell’s life on YouTube. It’s in these interviews that we see Marcel and Connie’s favorite TV show is “60 Minutes” — Connie just calls it “the show,” and can make the stopwatch sound really well — and learn bits of wisdom, like when Marcel says, “My cousin fell asleep in a pocket, and that’s why I don’t like the saying ‘everything comes out in the wash,’ because sometimes it doesn’t.”

The videos get only a handful of viewers at first — but then they become a viral sensation, with millions of views, instant memes, and mentions on TV. Internet fame has its pitfalls, Marcel learns, particularly when his fans find the house and show up at all hours to take selfies and wreak havoc on the lawn.

Marcel worries that his life will change with his new fame — and he’s already suffered through one horrible change in life, when his entire family disappeared on the same night that the house’s original occupants, referred to as “the man” and “the woman,” moved out. But Dean convinces Marcel that maybe he can help find his missing family.

It’s a small squad that makes “Marcel the Shell With Shoes On” go. Slate, Fleischer Camp and Nick Paley wrote the screenplay, and share story credit with Elisabeth Holm, who’s one of the producers. Fleischer Camp and Paley edited the film. The legendary Chiodo Bros. studio handled the animation, which is both whimsical and profound.

Fleischer Camp, in his feature directing debut, handles both the technical challenges and the emotional ups and downs of Marcel’s story with appropriate tenderness. It’s weird to be chuckling at a one-inch mollusk, then being moved to tears by that same shell a few minutes later. But when a movie tackles fame, loneliness, family dynamics and grief — and can pause for a Philip Larkin poem — and does it as serenely and humorously as this movie does, you give in to the weirdness and let this perfect little movie work its wonders.

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‘Marcel the Shell With Shoes On’

★★★★

Opens Friday, July 15, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City) and Century 16 (South Salt Lake). Rated PG for some suggestive material and thematic elements. Running time: 90 minutes.