At both the Baftas on Sunday night and the Oscars next month, there’s a strong chance that the award for best animated feature will go to Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, an astonishing stop-motion animation that uses a beloved fairytale as a springboard for a deep dive into themes of death, fascism and Catholic guilt. Yet there’s another contender that has also been dazzling audiences with its ability to blend philosophical profundity with stop-motion whimsicality – a gently absurdist mockumentary about the inner life of a lonely shell who spends his days perambulating around an Airbnb, musing upon matters of life, the universe and everything.
“Life relentlessly goes on, and people get lost… and you continue to be alive, and you have to decide how to do that with some sort of grace and curiosity.” That’s how co-writer and actor Jenny Slate slyly described the moral of Marcel the Shell With Shoes On in a recent Guardian interview. She provides the voice of the film’s inch-high hero – a tiny carapace with scampering feet and a single eye, who film-maker Dean (played by director Dean Fleischer Camp) meets when he moves into temporary accommodation. Dean has recently split from his partner and needs a place to stay. As for Marcel, he’s been separated from his own family since the human couple who once owned this house broke up, leaving him with only his grandmother Nana Connie for company.
Beautifully voiced by Isabella Rossellini, Connie is a joy – a tender force of nature, increasingly afflicted by memory loss, but indefatigable in her desire for her grandson to live his life to the full. Marcel may see himself as Connie’s full-time carer, but it’s clear that their relationship is reciprocal. “All I want is for you to try,” she tells Marcel. “It’s a big wide world. Let’s forget about being afraid. Don’t use me as an excuse not to live.”
The roots of this awards-feted feature go back to an eye-catching short film (the first of a trilogy) that Fleischer Camp and Slate made in 2010. The couple married in 2012 and announced a full-length version of Marcel in 2014, around the same time that Slate (whose animated voice credits range from Bob’s Burgers to The Lego Batman Movie) was making waves in Gillian Robespierre’s forthright romcom Obvious Child. So strong was the couple’s faith in the project that it endured even through their 2016 divorce – although it’s hard not to see echoes of real life in the film’s various fractured families and broken relationships, all of which are approached with a generosity of spirit that reaps bittersweet rewards.
While subjects as dark as separation and death may be faced head-on (a reading from Philip Larkin’s The Trees had me in tears), there’s a comedic quality that reminded me of Aardman’s sublime Creature Comforts animations – a joyous juxtaposition of quotidian, vérité-style dialogue and fancifully inventive visuals that hits a tragicomic sweet spot. From satirical offhand asides about the nature of documentary film-making (“It’s like a movie but nobody has any lines, and nobody even knows what it is while they’re making it”) to a fearful description of the B&B’s housecleaner being “the harbinger of the vacuum”, the giggles are plentiful. Even a recklessly extended gag that really shouldn’t work, about bagging an interview on the popular US TV show 60 Minutes , somehow manages to land without destroying the film’s delightfully incidental air – no mean feat.
A playful score by Disasterpeace (AKA Richard Vreeland), whose feature film soundtracks include It Follows and Under the Silver Lake, negotiates the shifting tones of the piece with aplomb, blending oddball quirkiness with spine-tingling ambience in a manner that plays with your heartstrings. By the time Marcel sings Peaceful Easy Feeling in Slate’s strangely warbling childlike voice, you’ll be wondering where you left your Eagles greatest hits album. It all climaxes on a quietly cosmic note that reminded me of the bizarrely philosophical final speech from The Incredible Shrinking Man in which the now-tiny hero realises that even though he is “smaller than the smallest, I meant something too”. The same can definitely be said of Marcel.
