Marcel the Shell with Shoes On
A24 throws its hat in the kid's movie arena with this sweet and surprisingly moving offering.
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From A24, the studio that brought you James Franco as a Riff Raff-esque gangster rapper (“Spring Breakers”), ritualistic elder suicide (“Midsommar”), Adam Sandler as a degenerate gambler jeweler (“Uncut Gems”) and butt plug auditing awards (“Everything Everywhere All at Once”), comes family-friendly flick “Marcel the Shell with Shoes On” (opening in select theaters on Friday, June 24).
“MtSwSO” is an adaptation/extension of a series of YouTube shorts by Dean Fleischer-Camp and Jenny Slate. Slate voices our title character, a 1-inch-tall shell whose life is upended when he’s separated from the majority of his family after a fight then flight between Larissa (Rosa Salazar) and Mark (Thomas Mann), the human inhabitants of the home wherein Marcel and his clan have resided.
Marcel’s only mollusk companion is Nona Connie (warmly voiced by Isabella Rossellini), his kindly yet forgetful grandmother who wiles her days away gardening and with whom he watches “60 Minutes” (they’re fans because Lesley Stahl is “fearless”).
Marcel’s life changes again with the arrival of Dean (Fleischer-Camp) and his dog (who often invades Marcel’s space to comedic results). Dean’s a fledgling documentary filmmaker who’s just separated from his wife and is renting the house as an Airbnb. He takes to filming and uploading videos of Marcel and Connie, which quickly become an online sensation. The clips serve as a means to reunite Marcel with the rest of his family.
“MtSwSO” is easily one of the best and sweetest films of the year thus far. I cried a lot and laughed even more. It’s a kid’s movie, but it’s an A24 kid’s movie (there’s a pube joke that’ll go right over the buggers’ little heads). I do think children will enjoy it – especially the stop motion animation overseen by legends in the field Edward and Stephen Chiodo (best known for “Killer Klowns from Outer Space” and “Team America: World Police”) – but this was ultimately made for adults.
The screenplay by Fleischer-Camp, Nick Paley and Slate with a story by the trio and Elisabeth Holm is largely about loss – Marcel’s loss of family and the loss of relationships (those of Larissa and Mark, Dean and his wife and to the largest and realest extent – that of Fleischer-Camp and Slate, who were married, divorced, remain friends and still work closely together … for which they certainly should be applauded). Death is also directly addressed. Kids will likely glom more onto moments in which in Marcel dips his shoes in honey and scales walls or tools around the house inside a rolling tennis ball, but the movie could prove to be a useful tool for parents to discuss divorce or mortality with their children.
There are so many admirable elements packed into the film’s svelte 90-minute runtime. The voiceovers by Slate and Rossellini are endearing and exemplary (Strangely, I now find Slate way more attractive after she’s voiced a male mollusk. I don’t know what this says about me?) and they’re ably supported by the comedic likes of Andy Richter and Nathan Fielder as Marcel’s father and brother respectively. Disasterpiece’s score sweetly and sensitively ups the emotional ante.
“MtSwSO” cut much deeper than I expected it to, but I can’t lie … crying to a shell singing the Eagles was strangely therapeutic.