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.
