The inch-tall star of online animated shorts – a seashell with a googly eye, shoes, and a winning personality – became a viral hit; now he is starring in a feature-length film, the heartwarming adventure “Marcel the Shell With Shoes On.”
There are plenty of BIG movies this summer, from “Top Gun: Maverick” and “Jurassic World: Dominion” to “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.” But the highest-rated one of all on Rotten Tomatoes is very, very small, with a main character no bigger than a quarter! Comedian, actor and author Jenny Slate has voiced plenty of animated characters, but she considers Marcel the Shell her finest creation. “He has this sort of granite dignity, but he’s so tiny. I think that there’s a lot of humor in watching something be the wrong size.”
“Guess what I do for adventure? I hang glide on a Dorito.”
Slate created Marcel’s distinctive voice in 2010 when, to save money attending a wedding, she was sharing one hotel room with five friends. “It was so crowded in there! And I just felt tiny. And all of a sudden, I just started saying [in this tiny voice], This, this is like, I, like, can hardly move. I can’t move around!”
Her boyfriend, filmmaker Dean Fleischer-Camp, loved the new little character voice, and decided to feature it in a short video. “I knew I wanted to make an animated short and sort of something I hadn’t experimented with before”, he told correspondent David Pogue. Fleischer-Camp went to a toy store and art supply shop and got a bunch of googly eyes and shells. The three-minute short featuring Marcel the Shell was a huge hit on YouTube.
“One time I nibbled on a piece of cheese, and my cholesterol went up to 900.”
In the next few years, the couple made two more Marcel videos, racking up 48 million views and counting.
