“Marcel the Shell” began as a series of lovingly crafted homemade shorts for YouTube by Dean Fleischer Camp and Jenny Slate. So when it came time to give the diminutive breakout star the feature film treatment — in A24’s “Marcel the Shell With Shoes On,” now playing in theaters nationwide — some technical concerns needed to be addressed.
“It’s a very mechanical process and because of the technical elements, it’s hard to get stuff that feels loose and organic. Every time you watch a stop-motion anything, you’re watching a time lapse of a sculpture being manipulated. Kirsten, more than any other young stop-motion artists I know, really embraced that in her work,” Camp said. “We shared the mission of trying to figure out how to make a stop-motion film that doesn’t feel lifeless.
“Marcel is meant to be such a simple thing made of found objects, but re-creating that in a more formal setting where we had to have hundreds of Marcels for our shoot and they all had to be consistent, that was quite a challenge. We had to mass produce something like that and make it animatable and sturdy enough,” explained Lepore.
I can’t believe I’ve been in a bubble about this.