This story about “Marcel the Shell with Shoes On” first appeared in the awards preview issue of awards magazine TheWrap.
“Marcel the Shell with Shoes On” is a big part of the conversation about the best animated movies of 2022, with its heartwarming story about following your dreams, led by a loveable lead character: a stop-motion little shell in tennis shoes. Voiced by Jenny Slate. But its eligibility in the Oscars’ animated feature category was in question until the filmmakers provided documentation on how the film was made. “We always thought it was an animated movie,” said director Dean Fleischer Camp. “If anything, I wish people knew the process by which we did this. And they would realize that there is much more animated than they think.
Nowhere is this clearer, Camp said, than in a scene towards the end of the film. Marcel has met his family, plus a bunch of other weirdos, including a peanut with eyes, some sort of ghost, and at least one character who appears to be just a tampon. They are seated around a human-sized sofa, some bouncing on the cushions and others skidding on a fine layer of dust on the nearby coffee table. It’s a joyous eruption of family chaos, and it was painstakingly animated to feel it loose.
“The shot is a perfect example of how much of the film is stop-motion animated,” Camp said. “Sometimes I get frustrated when people say, ‘Well, that’s just a live-action movie with a stop-motion character.’ The truth is that the illusion is that Marcel is the only thing that is stop-motion. But really, all of the animators and all of our artists on the film are doing a little bit of a two-step that makes it look that way. All of the physics, props, and natural elements of the real world are animated in stop-motion to perfectly mimic real life.”
The scene was animated by a single animator over the course of a week, which Camp admitted is unusual, considering the complexity of the shot and the fact that there are 200 characters in it. Using a motion control rig like the one used in the original “Star Wars,” the shot was accomplished in three passes, beginning with a live action plate shot. But because everything the characters interact with must also meticulously move in stop-motion, Camp said the actual sofa was “completely gutted and then re-stuffed to look exactly like a real sofa with a clay material.” that it will actually hold.” its shape.” The sofa was then loaded with levers and pistons to simulate the impact when the characters (which are largely weightless) jump up and down.
The techniques used in that take were repeated throughout the process of creating “Marcel the Shell with Shoes On”. “That’s the case with any object Marcel interacts with or anything we’d like to add to the live-action footage, including the wind blowing through some trees or a leaf flying past,” Camp said. “All of that has to be made of a material that can be animated.”
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