When the first Marcel the Shell short went viral, it was a bit of an accident. As cocreator Jenny Slate told Seth Meyers this week on Late Night, her then partner Dean Fleischer Camp showed the stop-motion film they made at a comedy show in 2010, then threw it up online at the request of a cast member who wanted to show his ailing mom. It became one of YouTube’s earliest sensations—”Gangnam Style” was still two years away, after all—and now, more than a decade later, its hero has his own film, one about the perils of the internet that made him famous.
Twelve years isn’t long in the grand scheme of things, but in online time, it’s practically an eon. It’s also long enough that Slate and Camp have been able to gain some perspective on Marcel’s rise to fame. “It’s so weird because I, of course, believe in it 100 percent, but sometimes even I can’t put my finger on it,” says Slate. She thinks Marcel’s strength lies in the juxtaposition of his size and his confidence but also admits that “people like to project their own feelings of how small they can feel onto him.”
And so Marcel remained beloved, even as “Gangnam Style” came and went. Camp says he and Slate once went on what he calls “a water bottle tour” of LA, stopping at all the studios to talk about Marcel after he went viral. At the time, Camp says, “there was a lot of interest in grafting Marcel onto a more familiar tentpole franchising template.” The pair knew when they left those meetings that they didn’t want Marcel to go the Stuart Little or Minions route. (They are, however, doing a line of merch with the film’s studio, A24, to promote Marcel.) Ultimately, Camp thinks their commitment to independence paid off.
“The thing that’s special to me about Marcel is not necessarily that he’s so tiny,” he explains. “It’s the fact that he doesn’t care about how tiny he is. He’s got iron willpower and self-respect, and he’s so self-possessed.”
Marcel’s cinematic world is simultaneously itty-bitty and comparatively enormous. In the film, he lives with his Nana Connie (the amazing Isabella Rossellini) in a colonial house once occupied by not only their whole shell and shell-adjacent family and neighborhood, but also a human married couple. The people never noticed Marcel and his buddies, who built a thriving community of houseplant homes, bread beds, and meals made up of bits of whatever food they could scrounge up. One day, the married couple got into a big fight and all of Marcel’s family, save his Nana, fled to the man’s sock drawer for safety. In a quick bid to leave the house, he threw the contents of all his drawers into a bag and fled, never to return. Marcel’s family went with him, lost to the winds of Los Angeles.
That’s not to say that Marcel is hopeless, because he’s not. Marcel the Shell finds him and his Nana growing a thriving garden, developing ingenious methods of food collection, and even keeping up with their favorite program, 60 Minutes. Camp says that, in a way, his creation’s drive has inspired even him. “When an obstacle gets thrown at him, he doesn’t see the impossibility of overcoming it,” Camp explains.
No doubt Camp had to summon some of Marcel’s inner strength when he was making the film, which took seven years from inception to completion. The process of stop-motion animation is beyond painstaking, and Slate and Camp underwent their own personal struggles, getting divorced a few years into production. Still, they soldiered on, out of respect for the project and a feeling that Slate calls “as involuntary as a heartbeat.” Though she cocreated, produced, and provided the voice of Marcel for the movie, Slate was able to dip in and out of production from time to time, if only to let Camp and cowriter Nick Paley really dig in. Still, she says, every time she would come back to Team Marcel, she would feel a very specific type of love.
“It’s like, ‘Why do you return to your favorite summer vacation spot?’ Not because it’s relaxing,” she says. “It’s because when you’re there, you feel a specific love for a place. That can only happen in the present that you’re in.”
Both Slate and Camp’s connection to Marcel the Shell feels deeply, deeply personal. Camp says Marcel reminds him of books he loved as a child, like The Borrowers, and of times at his grandma’s house when she’d tell him and his siblings to go “play in fairyland,” an area he only realized years later was actually just the tick-infested space under her deck. Slate now has her own daughter, Ida, who’s about 18 months old. Through Marcel, Slate says she’s learned to embrace things like the shell’s insistence on having a good life.
“Everything is imbued with worth,” she says. “I want my daughter to understand that there is a moment in the car on a summer morning to roll down the window and smell the air, and that’s a very high-worth moment. You can make a day into a beautiful, beautiful string of moments for yourself that way, and I would just like her to feel that availability for herself.” She cites a scene near the end of the movie when Marcel talks about needing to feel like he’s part of one large instrument as something she feels especially attached to and would like to pass on. “I want [my daughter] to understand that she is connected to everyone and that there’s a way to thoughtfully position yourself so that you’re really harmonized. There are distances between us sometimes, but we are all together.”
Within that frame, Marcel the Shell becomes a movie examining the intersection of community and loneliness. Marcel loses his community, so he feels lonely. When he meets Camp’s character—a documentarian also named Dean—he starts opening up again, if only to have someone else to talk to. When Dean makes a (very metal) short about Marcel to post online, it goes viral, leading Marcel to wonder if he can harness his newfound admirers to find his family. It doesn’t work like he wants. His little house instead becomes a hotspot for TikTokkers looking for clout more than connection, and Marcel is left to once again ponder what it means to have a place where he belongs.
That clout vs. connection struggle is one of the reasons Slate says she’s mostly left social media, though she does still occasionally post on her Instagram. (Especially if, say, she’s out promoting a new movie like Marcel the Shell.) She says she’s not interested in engaging in “useless and flammable” finger-wagging over whether people are using the internet correctly, but her own past reliance on social media taught her that “having success in one way or another actually won’t solve your loneliness. It won’t demystify whether or not you are a powerful person or a worthwhile person. The answers aren’t out there.”
Maybe part of the beauty of Marcel the Shell, the character and the film, is that we don’t have all the answers and we don’t really know how to get them. Consider the shell itself, which is in its own way a kind of wonder. Shells are utilitarian, existing just to give mollusks a protective shield, but they’re also beautiful. They’re “extra,” Slate says. “They don’t need to be that beautiful.” Like Marcel, a shell is simple but perfect, and a good example of how, as Slate puts it, “the Earth doesn’t make things just for fun.” Everything has a function, she explains, citing Robin Wall Kimmerer’s work about how goldenrods and asters always bloom together. Everything in nature has a purpose, but also, everything is what she calls “a beautiful mystery.” To live like Marcel the Shell—and, for that matter, to appreciate Marcel the Shell—is all about sitting back, opening your eyes and heart, and simply letting the world rush in.