Marcel the Shell Recensione

Marcel it’s a talking snail (“with shoes“) who lives and hides in a house with a garden, in his company Grandma Connie. When the house is rented from videomaker Deanthe two make friends and the man decides to make a documentary about Marcel’s little big world. Will the popularity of those videos allow Marcel to reunite with his lost family?

Marcel the Shell it is more than it seems, and only by opening up to this awareness will it be possible to “enter” his precious narrative force but also metaphoricalturning a blind eye to a design that can push back. Because, we write it in total honesty, the little protagonist of the film by Dean Fleischer-Campanimated in stop-motion in a live world, didn’t capture us right away, due to an aspect that wasn’t immediately tender, on the contrary. In the passage from three semi-amateur shorts written and made between 2010 and 2014 by Dean with Jenny Slate (who doubles him in the original), Marcel has maintained a certain approximation in his look, and one has to accept the disturbing single eye of these snails to achieve the necessary empathy. But it takes very little.

The tens of millions of views on YouTube of the three short films, also popular at the Sundance Film Festival, they contain only a part of the mystery of the success of this reincarnation into a feature film, Marcel the Shell, which opened Alice nella Città here in Italy last autumn. Simple and ironic but not too naive, very human in its contradictions but also in its own pursuit of happinesssuspended between leaps and understandable hesitations, Marcel is immediately irresistible in his constant dialogue with Dean off-screen (although we wouldn’t be willing to put our hand on the fire on the rendering of the curious tone in the foreign versions). In transitioning to feature film, Fleischer-Camp and Slate enlisted the help of the Emmy nominee Nick Paleyto build a slightly more complex story, where the fairy-tale strangeness by Marcel is accompanied by themes transmitted with delicacy of detail: the solitudethe old agel’mourning processingl’friendship. No enlargement weighs on Marcel’s programmatic ingenuity, because the form of the fake documentary feeds a humorous detachment even in the most emotional moments, and indeed makes them less rhetorical and therefore more touching.

Marcel the Shell’s real gift though is in what represents and embodies only by existing, more than in what it tells. An ordinary house explodes with meaning, it becomes a realm of the imagination only because it is re-read through Marcel’s eyes and actions. The astonishment of the character Dean while filming him seems to be the amazement of the director Dean, which entrusts to the power of the audiovisual the ability to give meaning to the banal, to the obvious, to what would never be beautiful or evocative in itself. And discovering all this, it share with us: Dean fascinated by Marcel is the director Dean who explains to us viewers how much strength there is in cinema and in animation. A praise goes to the production of the film, because the technical team and Chiodo Bros. Productions have expanded the expressiveness and articulation of the characters, while maintaining the perception of craftsmanshipvery important for the effect we are describing.

And it is precisely the barrier between the two “Deans” that seems to disappear, because when you touch the theme of separationdo you think Dean Fleischer-Camp and Jenny Slate parted ways between the original shorts and this new adventure, but ended up working together on the film: theeternity of feelings of Marcel towards his affections is autopia in which whoever created the film still struggles to believe. Is it difficult that the fairy tale exists in real life? At the very least, Fleischer-Camp holds out hope, because Marcel the Shell basically comes across as a documentary that pretends to film reality, only to rewrite it in the best way. The form is the best content of this precious work. The best lines are no more important than many small touches in minimalist shots or sets, or pauses in an editing that dismisses contemporary anxieties. Marcel the Shell starts from home worlds that we have willingly or unwillingly learned to know well, thanks to the lockdown, and it reminds us how much imagination and creativity can widen them. He reminds us of it in the moving story, but above all he reminds us of it by reasoning on the power that a shot has to transfigure reality.