From KCRW, I'm Kim Masters, and this is The Business.

Today we revisit our conversation with the creators of Marcel the Shell with shoes on,

which became a thing more than 10 years ago when a short film about the sweet but lonely one inch tall talking shell went viral.

Guess what I use as a beanbag chair, A raisin. Now Marcel, brought to life through

stop motion animation, is the subject of his own Academy Award-nominated movie. Director Dean Fleischer-Camp

says he could take an improvisational approach to making the film because actress Jenny Slate is so

completely at home doing the voice of Marcel.

That production model would not have been possible with another actor or performer because

Jenny is able to stay in character as Marcel basically all the time. And that allowed us to do

things that you wouldn't be able to do in a normal voiceover recording setup.

Slate and Fleischer Camp share how they finally turned a short film that was produced in a couple of days

into a full-length feature. But first we banter. Stick around. It's the business from KCRW.

I am joined by my buddy in banter, Matt Bellany. Hello, Matt.

Hi there.

So to the surprise of no one,

David Zaslov, head of Warner Brothers Discovery, they had an event announcing that the combined streamer, this is the Discovery streamer and the streamer formerly known as HBO Max,

will be unveiled in May and it will be called only Max.

And as was noted in the presentation that the executives gave to the press, one of them said,

HBO is not TV, HBO is HBO.

And certainly the desire on the part of Casey Blois, who runs HBO and what has been

HBO Max, has been to get away from the branding of HBO as part of this

combined streamer. And that clearly is a message that Zazlov and colleagues agreed to.

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