A24’s “Marcel the Shell With Shoes On” is an awards season darling. The live-action stop-motion hybrid film recently won the Annie Award for Independent Feature Film along with two other awards. Jenny Slate won the voice acting award for her performance as Marcel while Slate, Dean Fleischer Camp, Nick Paley and Elizabeth Holm won for feature writing.
Camp brought on animation director Kirsten Lepore to help merge the worlds of animation and live action. As Oscar voting wraps up Tuesday, Camp and Lepore discussed bringing Marcel to life, collaborating, and the film’s reception.
It’s been a journey since the film was released in June, how does it feel to hear adults and children kissing Marcel?
Kirsten Lepore: I got a lot of text messages and calls from friends saying it was the first movie their kids were seeing in the theater. It was so wild and an honor.
Dean Fleischer Camp: It’s such an honor.
Lepore: Everyone went back to the movies, and for it to be the first movie the kids saw, that was special.
Fleischer Camp: I hadn’t thought of that and how they’re always going to remember that. I remember my first, it was “Robocop”. My mom was mad at my dad for taking me away when I was three.
I’ve heard of people finding it at the right time and they’re going through something and it’s helped them feel more resolved about grief and loss.
Lepore: Someone came up to me, I think it was the Q&A you moderated, this girl came up to me. She said she was adopted and never identified with any character more than Marcel. She was actively looking for her birth parents and seeing this movie was so touching and emotional for her. These stories blow me away and are so unexpected. I like to say, “He’s a shell, but he’s one of the most human characters.”
So far, how have you given Marcel this human vibe?
Fleisher Camp: I love that he’s this little dude that contains such multitudes. It was a creative choice and we tried to write in this direction. That’s why we opted for an intimate style of storytelling and introspection. We delved into that and discovered the heart of this character. He was fully formed when we did the shorts, so it was about writing introspectively.
With stop motion, it’s so charming and human. It’s an artisanal and inevitably flawed process.
Lepore: It’s those little imperfections that make stop motion work. I think people feel more connected to these characters because they feel he exists in the real world. Marcel is not a sentient living being, but thanks to stop-motion he is a physical being, and we could create more of an illusion of life and give him that tangible quality.
There was also authenticity which has always been important in the documentary style. We wanted it to be completely believable. We wanted you to feel like we just turned on the camera and he’s right there. Making the world around him as realistic as possible was part of achieving that authenticity.
Let’s talk about your collaborative process and working together on this.
Lepore: I came to this in 2014 and it was in the background at that point, but I knew the writing would get to a point where we were ready to start storyboarding. So we started there in 2017. We did it through FaceTime and Zoom. It was this great process of having a meeting in the morning and doing our thing.
There were two shoots. Live action where we have live plates and backgrounds. It was the traditional shoot with someone holding a little Marcel on a puppet and estimating where he would go in a scene or how far or what the action would be. This process informed integration throughout.
Once we got to the stop motion stage and did this shoot, that’s when Dean sat next to me and we had our list of thoughts and we were discussing things. We would simply act against each other. I would play Marcel and Dean would play Connie and vice versa.
Fleischer Camp: There’s a whole cut of the movie you could cut together of me playing Marcel and Kirsten playing Connie, or vice versa. He’s a fucking genius.
I was made aware of her because our shorts were touring the same festival circuit in 2010. Her short, “Bottle” is a love story between two characters where one is made of ice cream and the the other is made of sand. It’s a fun punky middle finger to what any school of animation would tell you, first of all is stop motion, which doesn’t work with materials that will crumble. I knew then that she was a kindred spirit.