Newport This Week

‘Marcel’ is a Rare Gem of Humor and Heart



“Marcel the Shell With Shoes On,” a brilliant mix of animation and live action, features characters voiced by Isabella Rossellini and Jenny Slate.

“Marcel the Shell With Shoes On,” a brilliant mix of animation and live action, features characters voiced by Isabella Rossellini and Jenny Slate.

Director Dean Fleischer Camp and writer/actress Jenny Slate turned their original creation Marcel the Shell, the tiny, philosophical seashell turned YouTube sensation, into a feature film that offers laughs as well as a surprising emotional center.

Slate, who provides the distinctive child-like voice for the oneeyed, one-inch mollusk, wrote the script with Fleischer Camp and Nick Paley. For “Marcel the Shell with Shoes On,” opening Aug. 6 at the Jane Pickens Theater, they adapted material from the original shorts and added characters and a bittersweet plot about loss, community and compassion. The blend of humor and heart is appropriate for all ages and seems especially meaningful right now.

Starting in 2010 when Fleischer Camp and Slate were a couple, they made the first of three wildly successful stop-motion animated short videos about Marcel, all shot in their Brooklyn apartment. They divorced in 2016, but continued to work together on the feature, which took a long time to develop due to the arduous stop-motion process.

Joséphine Sanz, left, and Gabrielle Sanz star in the exquisite French film “Petite Maman.”

Joséphine Sanz, left, and Gabrielle Sanz star in the exquisite French film “Petite Maman.”

The film seamlessly combines the animated miniature world of Marcel with live action, including Fleischer Camp playing himself as a filmmaker named Dean who’s fresh from a breakup. Dean holes up in a Los Angeles Airbnb, where he discovers Marcel and decides to make a documentary about the shell’s life and musings. Through flashbacks, we learn about an event in the house that scattered Marcel’s close community of shells, leaving him with only his grandmother, Nana Connie (voiced by Isabella Rossellini), a soft-spoken gardener and singer. Marcel and Nana Connie have chemistry and real intimacy that’s touching, but never saccharine, as Connie’s increasing frailty inspires Marcel’s protectiveness.

There are sweetly comic scenes, such as Marcel coaxing Connie to “skate” through a veneer of dust across a table, and the two watching their favorite TV show, “60 Minutes.”

Loren King is an arts and entertainment writer whose work appears regularly in The Boston Globe and other publications.

Loren King is an arts and entertainment writer whose work appears regularly in The Boston Globe and other publications.

It makes sense that a skilled improviser like Slate would thrive with the free-flowing banter in the film. But Fleischer Camp also gets a delightfully comic and tender performance from Rossellini, whose witty and wise Nana shares advice with Marcel about facing one’s fears. Also a welcome surprise is “60 Minutes” anchor Lesley Stahl, who appears as herself in a key sequence.

The painstaking process of creating stop-motion animation and the spontaneity of the film’s documentary and improvisational style may seem at odds. But the seamless way Marcel’s world is integrated into the live action is what makes it so engaging and the themes of grief and resiliency so moving.

A fairytale, a ghost story, a spare meditation on grief, loss, motherhood and the delicate mysteries of childhood, French director Celine Sciamma’s “Petite Maman,” available on steaming platforms, is all these things adding up to a deeply moving, spellbinding film.

If Sciamma’s sumptuous “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” (2019) was a layered, novelistic romance, her follow-up is as taut and precisely crafted as a short story.

The premise is simple: 8-year-old Nelly’s (Joséphine Sanz) grandmother has recently died and Nelly and her mother, Marion (Nina Meurisse), along with Nelly’s dad (Stéphane Varupenne) must clean out Marion’s remote childhood house. It’s a sorrowful task and suddenly Marion disappears, leaving Nelly and her father alone to complete the job.

One day, Nelly ventures into woods where she meets another 8-year-old, named Marion (Gabrielle Sanz, Joséphine’s twin sister), who lives in a nearby house that’s identical to Nelly’s mother’s childhood home.

Sciamma and her “Portrait” cinematographer, Claire Mathon, create an atmosphere both realist and otherworldly. Nelly is often drenched in blue or shot with a celestial golden glow above her head. There is an air of mystery, an eerie but elegant strangeness to the story.

Yet the girls’ easy friendship is natural, lovely and believable. This unsentimental film evokes tenderness and heartbreak in what children can never know about a parent, and what a gift it is to imagine glimpsing that precious unknowable, even for a moment.

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