‘Marcel the Shell’ creators bring beloved tiny creature to the big screen

The Business

KCRW

Tv & Film

4.6 • 676 Ratings

🗓️ 15 July 2022

⏱️ 29 minutes

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Summary

After almost an eight-year hiatus, actor Jenny Slate and director Dean Fleischer-Camp are bringing their lovable Marcel the Shell back to life. This time audiences will see the seashell with two pink shoes and one plastic eye, who babbles insightful and funny life-observations, in the stop-motion, feature-length mockumentary, “Marcel the Shell With Shoes On.” The online shorts were a smash-hit at the time, so for Fleischer-Camp it was important for the film to maintain Marcel’s original online integrity. That is why, he explains, “it took a while for us to find the right partners to do that, in a way that was really holistic to what we had made and what and how we like to work.” And because Fleischer-Camp invented much of the filmmaking process, Slate remarks that they wanted to take that to the film production, “so we took the risk to try to create that [environment] for ourselves.” The duo now share the story behind how “Marcel the Shell” was created, and their trajectory of taking this tiny character from being a YouTube sensation to the big screen. But first, Kim Masters and Matt Belloni banter about the Emmys group-like nominations this year. And while Hulu got 58 nods, its future as a streaming platform remains uncertain.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From KCRW, I'm Kim Masters, and this is the business.
0:05.6	Marcel the shell with shoes on became a thing more than 10 years ago when a short film about the sweet but lonely one-inch talking shell went viral.
0:14.2	Guess what I use as a beanbag chair? A raisin.
0:18.4	Now, Marcel, brought to life through stop motionmotion animation, is the subject of his own movie.
0:23.6	Director Dean Fleischer-Camp says he could take an improvisational approach to making the film
0:28.6	because actress Jenny Slate is so completely at home doing the voice of Marcel.
0:33.6	That production model would not have been possible with another actor or performer
0:38.4	because Jenny is able to stay in character as Marcel basically all the time,
0:42.7	and that allowed us to do things that you wouldn't be able to do in a normal voiceover recording setup.
0:48.8	Slate and Fleischer Camps share how they finally turned a short film that was produced in a couple of days
0:53.6	into a full-length
0:54.7	feature with just about 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
0:58.8	But first we banter, stick around.
1:00.8	It's the business from KCRW.
1:03.5	I am joined by my partner in banter.
1:05.9	Matt Bellany.
1:06.4	Hello, Matt.
1:07.0	Hi there.
1:07.8	So we're just going to talk ever so briefly about the Emmys because it's the same damn
1:12.5	thing every year.
1:15.7	It's like, wait, my show that I liked or my actor was overlooked and this was nominated.
1:22.8	And some of these nominations is seriously, you were like, that show is still on, and haven't we awarded it
	...

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