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TELLURIDE, Col. — Jenny Slate is a loss for words. Friday night Telluride Film Festival and the actress has just landed her first flight at 17 months, still foggy out of quarantine, at a time when she is the mother of two different but equally profound projects: creating a brand new baby girl and a feature film where she spent ten years.
Slate is here because of the sound work on Marcel the Shell, the most unlikely of internet sensations. No bigger than a nickel, with a single protruding eye and shoes stolen from a Polly Pocket doll, this stop-motion mollusk set the internet on fire when she and filmmaker Dean Fleischer Camp uploaded it. a three minute video He returned to YouTube in 2010. Showcasing Marcel’s quiet optimism, this short – “I love myself and I have many other great qualities” – sparked instant attention and ultimately garnered more than 31 million views in total. (Two more short films followed in 2011 and 2014.)
Marcel’s voice is different from Slate’s other animation works, whether it’s Harley Quinn in “Lego Batman” or Tammy Larsen in “Bob’s Burgers.” (sang Missy Foreman-Greenwald in “Big Mouth” By 2020, he left his post, saying, “Black characters in an animated series should be played by Black people.” (“Some people say my head is too big for my body, and I say, ‘Compared to what?’”) And it was so contagious that it caused two best-selling books to appear in memes on the late-night talk show. , tattoos and offers for television programs and commercial sponsorships.
But Slate and Camp, who first created Marcel as a married couple, but are now involved in other relationships, have been so protective of Marcel that instead of getting an easy payday – Slate admits it will help the artists as they struggle – for the next ten years. year will turn it into a feature film.
It was a painstaking process involving a group of animators and designers. Friday night was the culmination of all this work when “Marcel the Shell in the Shoe” made its world premiere. The 90-minute mockup follows emerging documentary filmmaker Dean (Camp) as he explores the only one-inch Marcel, who has moved to an Airbnb, along with his memory-challenging grandmother Nana Connie (voiced by Isabella Rossellini) and pet fur. . Named Alan, he grieves after a mysterious tragedy robs the rest of their community from their comfortable abode.
Slate likens the making of the movie to watching one of the science videos of a flower blooming in fast motion.
“You wake up one morning and there’s a flower and it’s blue,” Slate said. “That’s the kind of feeling.”
A little shyer and more reserved than you might expect, Slate is still thinking about his post-pandemic life. More pleased that he and Camp first created Marcel as a comic piece for a friend’s comedy show, Slate says he no longer feels the need to make people (even his therapist) laugh and is less interested in pleasing others, a feeling he believes is his baby right now. and her fiancé Ben Shattuck, the result of the “endless cycle of love”.
“We’ve been in the process for a long time, and this character has had very different functions for me,” he added. “At first, I think I need to prove to myself again that I’m funny. And then I realized that I was actually doing something very personal to me. So making the movie was trying to show this inner part of me. I can’t believe this is working.”
And it worked. Hollywood Reporter He described it as “a sweet, uncomplicated film whose message about self-compassion and community feels particularly forward-thinking.” And Independent Wire He recognized it as the critics’ choice and called it “the cutest movie about family grief you’ll ever see all year, maybe ever.”
“Marcel” is one of a handful of films that are making their Telluride debut and seeking buyers. Despite being worked on for almost a decade, it’s one of many films at the festival, including Mike Mills’ “C’mon, C’mon”, Joe Wright’s “Cyrano” and Peter Hedges’ “The Same Storm.” I feel like it’s a response to our current mood of anxiety and alienation. “I’m really glad that the movie is coming right now,” said Camp, suggesting the random timing suggests that “even before we hit, we felt more and more isolated and vulnerable.”
In 2010, when Marcel first appeared, Slate said he was “expecting to be fired from “Saturday Night Live,” which he had been working on for an unhappy year. Yet it was the voice he had never used on the sketch show that moved Marcel.
“I felt like I had made every sound I could to save myself out there, and then suddenly, this sound I had never made before came out of my mouth,” he said. “Looking back, using it exclusively for myself was a real choice. It wouldn’t have belonged to ‘SNL’ anyway, and it was a very welcome opening to the belief that there is a world outside the small, narrow aisle that contains what you perceive as your own failure.”
Slate and Camp spent a year and a half recording the enhanced audio sessions to make the movie. His co-writers and editors, Nick Paley and Camp, then devoted an equal amount of time to translating these improvised pieces into script format. This eventually became an animatic (audio with music and storyboard visuals) for test audiences to watch and show to make sure everything worked before filming live action followed by stop-motion animation. “Ultimately, we’re back to a standalone version of the Pixar process,” Camp said.
Yet the basic premise has always remained the same: Marcel had lost most of his crustacean family due to an argument about humans.
“We’ve always loved that the overflow of sentimentality from the human world, causing this massive disruption in the shell world,” added Slate, adding that the creation of Nana Connie has long been part of the plan. “The idea was what you would do when your life fell apart as you know, and the only person who remembers it would end up not remembering at all.”
It is this poignancy and heartbreak that gives the film its center. It is also the creative project Slate is most proud of. Now she sings to her daughter in Marcel’s voice. (He believes she’s a better singer than he is.) And while he doesn’t know what’s next for this sweet but stubborn avatar, it’s clear that Marcel has dug himself deep into it.
“I always think of Marcel as my truest self and how I would really like to be if my ego and the pitfalls of being a patriarchal woman hadn’t gotten in my way.”
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