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Stop motion animation proceeds at a snail’s pace at the best of times but it took over a decade for Marcel to move from its DIY origins to full length feature.
When the director Dean Fleischer Camp and his co-writer and
star Jenny Slate made their first short featuring the one-eyed mollusk Marcel
the Shell with Shoes On in 2010, they couldn’t have imagined its impact:
more than 32 million views to date on YouTube.
Those shorts have now been adapted into a feature film, a
process that Camp worried could rob the project of low-fi, low-budget charm.
“I think especially with processes that are really
technical,” he told the NYT “you can very easily lose the authentic, organic thing.”
As Marcel’s short films went viral online, Hollywood studios
and networks approached Camp and Slate. The duo took the meetings, but were
wary of attempts to attach Marcel to a more familiar tentpole template.
“I remember somebody suggested that we partner Marcel with
Ryan Reynolds so they could fight crime,” Camp recalls to the LA Times.
“I’m not saying I wouldn’t watch that movie, but I just knew that was not the
right avenue to pursue for him. We knew after that round of meetings, ‘If we’re
going to expand Marcel, it needs to be made independently.’”
Camp was committed to preserving the authentic,
loose-sounding audio and documentary texture of the originals, Camp explained
to AVClub.
“So we kind of had to invent a new production model in order to do that.”
Joining creative forces with co-writer Nick Paley, the team
wrote a long treatment and started hosting recording sessions where Slate would
give form to Marcel’s dialogue with spur of the moment ingenuity. Based on what
those improvisation meetings yielded, Camp and Paley slowly polished and
rerouted the plot.
“They would put together a patchwork of transcription of
recorded audio and then write new scenes. Then we would record off of those
written new scenes and improvise off of them too,” Slate told the NYT. “Most of
the film is highly improvised, while some parts were word-for-word written out,
depending on what Dean and Nick decided to do.”
Almost nothing is recorded in a studio except a few lines as
pick ups. “The path most Hollywood projects take is: you write a screenplay and
then you make the movie,” Dean tells AVClub. “I’ve always felt like that robs
us of so much that can happen in the way that people interact non-verbally. So
with Marcel The Shell, you can hear it in the audio. You would
never write certain lines if they hadn’t been in the same room.”
During this time they found backing at indie darling A24 who
helped bring aboard arthouse icon Isabella Rossellini to voice a key character.
The writing and recording and iterating process took two and a half years but audio was only part of the challenge. Where the camera for the shorts was kept pretty static Camp knew that a feature-length narrative would require more movement, more locations and more interactions with other characters. Plus, they would stick to the format of stop motion live action hybrid.
This type of production has been around since the earliest
days of cinema but there are so few features made this way, partly because of
how complex it is. The filmmaker essentially has to commit to shooting every
shot in the film at least twice, first live-action and then stop-motion. And in
the final edit these elements combines provided both sets of footage are a
perfect match.
“It’s so complex and labor-intensive, but I felt committed
to it for that reason,” Camp explains in the film’s production notes. “The
constraints that make stop-motion so hard can actually result in more textured,
emotional performances because it’s such an imprecise, human process. That
fallibility translates into a kind of warmth.”
So when shooting the live-action portion, stop-motion
cinematographer Eric Adkins took notes of every minute detail - lens, depth of
field, the distance and angle of the camera to the characters, the distance to
props, every source of lighting. Anything that was reflective that the
character was standing near that might bounce light on him so they could
recreate it exactly on the animation stages. If any tiny detail was off, the
animation wouldn’t mesh well with the live-action plate.
“You should see his iPad, it’s just like, every time I
glanced down at it, it was like A Beautiful Mind scratchings
of equations and measurements,” Dean told AVClub.
Marcel The Shell premiered at the 2021 Telluride Film
Festival and recently went on nationwide release. As with the shorts, “the
tweeness factor is high”, reviews Rolling Stone”though
mileage may vary on whether you add ‘unbearably’ as a descriptive there.
Yet even the harshest critic finds an “extreme sense of
melancholy and isolation,” that resonates with the hardest of hearts.
Says Rolling Stone: “The ache of loneliness pulses at the
center of this labor of love.”
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