And so when Marcel shows Dean the intricacies of his life, from using honey on his feet to climb walls to jury-rigging a mixer to help shake nuts off a nearby tree, we can just enjoy the quirks without thinking about it too hard. Marcel merely exists and that’s good enough for Dean and everyone else with whom Marcel comes into contact in the film. What makes the humor of the film work is that there’s no struggle with trying to figure out how a shell has come alive or anything like that. A search for the family winds up involving a bunch of would-be TikTok influencers and, somehow, 60 Minutes’ Lesley Stahl, but the film rarely steps outside of the house in which it started, keeping their world contained. There’s little more to the plot than that, although the idea that the rest of Marcel’s family was accidentally taken when the former owner moved out comes into play. The house’s latest tenant is a documentary filmmaker (Fleischer-Camp) who becomes fascinated by Marcel and records him going about his life.
He lives in a house with his grandmother, Connie (Isabella Rossellini), one that used to be occupied by a human couple but is now rented out as an Airbnb. Marcel (Slate) is, as the title would suggest, a one-inch tall, one-eyed shell who wears shoes.
She’s now come full circle, as she and co-creator Dean Fleischer-Camp have expanded the short stop-motion videos they did into a full-fledged feature film.īut even though the screen is bigger, the story remains as small and whimsical as ever. She’s also become a go-to voice actor for Disney and others, a career she started in 2010 viral video, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On.
Slate had not hurt for work since leaving SNL in 2010, scoring a slew of TV parts and starring in the acclaimed 2014 film Obvious Child. But for a select few like Jenny Slate, who was there for just two seasons, their time on show is a mere footnote, obscured by the success they’ve had once they were allowed to spread their wings elsewhere. For others, a long run on SNL pushes them into comedy superstardom. For some Saturday Night Live cast members, their time on the show is the highlight of their careers.