Marcel the Shell: a film about a tiny voice with a big heart

Jenny Slate and Dean Fleischer-Camp were at a bit of a career crossroads when they manifested Marcel, a one-inch-tall seashell with a tiny voice and a big heart. “All of those ideas were centered on grafting Marcel onto a more familiar tentpole action-adventure franchise,” Fleischer-Camp says. “People know that the stop motion process is slow, but I think they don’t realise, like, how slow,” Lepore explains. “It would take one animator working on a stage an entire day to do a shot that was five, maybe 10 seconds long.” When Fleischer-Camp looks back at the earliest days of Marcel, he knew that they had something special even then. “People really connect with this little character.” For Slate, Marcel and his utter sincerity, innocence and wisdom was an expression of things she was feeling but didn’t quite know how to communicate at the time — at least as herself.