Director Dean Fleischer Camp Talks Animation Debate, Marcel’s Long Journey to the Big Screen

Awards Daily talks to Marcel the Shell with Shoes On director Dean Fleischer Camp about the debate surrounding film animation and how Marcel was shot at least twice (for real).

The process of getting Marcel the Shell with Shoes On to the big screen might be described as snail-paced—even if our one-inch protagonist is not a snail, just a shell.

“We were playing with the idea of a feature even way back in 2011,” says Marcel director Dean Fleischer Camp. “But it didn’t really materialize in the way I hoped. It was clear [studios] wanted to make a different kind of film, more of a franchise, tentpole-type of movie that big studios make.”

So during that time of pitching and feeling out offers, Camp and the Marcel team, including co-creator Jenny Slate, took the opportunity as “a process of clarifying.”

“I knew inside I was saying no to those offers because there was something more special I was seeking for this character. But I wasn’t in touch with what that was exactly. What that gained us was the opportunity to flesh that character out and his world, bit by bit, as it felt good to us to do.”

In that time, he and Slate made a few more shorts, collaborated on a couple of New York Times best-selling Marcel books, and slowly pieced together what a movie featuring their shell protagonist might look like.

“I could see this suddenly boom with total clarity what this feature could be like, and it was personal and about moving through grief. It hit these major cinematic emotional beats but with the smallest, tiniest means possible. And so that became the challenge.”

Don’t Call It a Mockumentary

With a background in documentary, Camp knew he wanted to keep the film in the same vein as the first short, which was rooted in rough-cut, verite style.

“What really worked about that initial short that I wanted to stay true to was the unusual pairing of something as casual or off-the-cuff spontaneous and authentic as a documentary with what we all know is the most labor-intensive form of animation on the planet [stop motion animation]. So the opposite of spontaneous! That combination led to friction or resonance that the short captures. That always felt like a part of the character.”

Camp was also interested in exploring when documentarians get too deep into their story as well as going beyond what might be described as a “mockumentary.”

“As a documentarian myself, I’m thinking about these questions all the time. How do you change something by documenting it? Are you exploiting your subject? Is your subject exploiting the filmmaker? All these questions that are so murky and increasingly relevant in today’s world. I’d also never seen a fictional documentary that took its character seriously and actually extended the same dignity to a talking shell as to the subject of Grey Gardens or any real documentary.”

Target Audience: “Every Living Human”

Because he and Slate avoided studio offers that would turn this into squarely a kids movie, they were able to keep the integrity of the original character, born on the internet.

“[The film] wasn’t subject to all of those considerations about marketing that sometimes serve to sand off the edges or to make this character less specific or push him into a certain box. I didn’t want to lose that, because truly the first audience for this short was me and Jenny,” says Camp with a laugh. “We made it for ourselves. I hope kids find it and love it as much as adults do, but our target audience is every living human.”

And most living humans go through a breakup of some sort at some point, whether it be friendship, relationships, or even severing ties from a job. Among the many subjects Marcel tackles, breakups are on that list, with two sets of couples going through a separation in this film, including the couple that Marcel used to live with and Dean Fleischer Camp’s fictionalized “Dean” in the story.

“For so many of us who worked on it and wrote the script, we really challenged ourselves to lend parts of ourselves to the project and to write from the heart about real experiences that we had. If it mirrored some of the creators’ real-life dramas or breakups, it’s not a coincidence, but it also isn’t a direct commentary on any specific breakup in our lives. But we just knew we wanted to be emotionally honest.”

Marcel was Filmed “Twice at the Least!”

Recently, Marcel was granted Animated Feature eligibility for the 2023 Academy Awards, something that caused a bit of debate in film circles about what constitutes animation.

“I understand the argument,” says Camp. “Marcel is stop motion but he’s the only thing that’s stop motion. But what I want to be able to say is that we did our jobs too well because you as a viewer have no idea how much is stop motion and that we rebuilt entire parts of living rooms—anything he interacts with that’s part of his moving world, that’s all animated to look and mimic real-world physics. The trick is that you can’t tell what’s stop motion, but so much more of the movie is stop motion than live action.”

Because no one had really combined stop motion animation with live action this extensively before, Camp didn’t have a ton of precedents to work with on how to go about doing this.

“The two phases of production really had to hold hands together. When we were shooting the live-action portion, the stop motion director, the stop motion cinematographer, the effects supervisor—all of these people were on set essentially taping hard elements so that they could rebuild them on the animation stages. But also taking the most meticulous notes about lighting.”

For example, during a scene where Dean and Marcel are driving in a car together (relax, Marcel is not behind the wheel), they had to be scrupulous about shadows. For every shadow that passes Marcel in the car, they had to mark it down in the time code and arrange a flag to motion-control move by the light so that that flicker happens on Marcel at the exact moment they pass a particular tree.

And if all of this doesn’t sound like something that might make you tear your hair out, they also shot the film more than once. “Twice at the least,” he says.

Camp, Slate, and Nick Paley wrote the screenplay and recorded the audio first (“It was pretty much a locked radio play”). Then animation director Kirsten Lepore and Camp storyboarded the whole movie (“That’s one version of the movie that exists on my laptop—among hundreds”). For the second version, they filmed all the background stuff for the live-action part, which didn’t have Marcel or any of the characters. And then finally they shot the animation (“. . .which really brings it to life”).

“There’s something really bonding about making a movie in a way that’s never quite been done before. You’re really pioneering new ground.”

What ground will Marcel be breaking next? Camp says it’s definitely not the end for his story.

“I don’t know what the next iteration of Marcel will be. We have so much that we wrote that didn’t make it into the film—hours and hours of top-tier Marcel material. Jenny and I always talked about doing a TV show. But after seven years of working on Marcel, I need a little bit of a break.”

Marcel the Shell with Shoes On is available to stream.