Marcel the Shell with Shoes On: An Interview with Dean Fleischer Camp (Web Exclusive)
by Scott MacDonald

If you know of Dean Fleischer Camp, it’s probably through his YouTube smash, the three-minute twenty-two second animation, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On (2010), voiced by Jenny Slate. At most recent count, Marcel the Shell has had more than thirty million hits. This homemade animation featuring a small, talkative seashell with colorful shoes and a googly eye has generated several spin-offs, including parts 2 (2011; eleven million hits) and 3 (2014; four and a half-million hits) and two children’s books, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On: Things About Me (2011) and Marcel the Shell: The Most Surprised I’ve Ever Been (2014)—all of them Fleischer Camp/Slate collaborations.

In recent years, after not finding early support for developing a feature based on the Marcel character, Fleischer Camp and Slate, along with Nick Paley, gradually transformed Marcel into the protagonist of an innovative stop-motion feature film that riffs on the history of direct-cinema documentary. In the feature, released earlier this year, Fleischer Camp plays himself as a filmmaker documenting his interaction with Marcel and Marcel’s Aunt Connie (voiced by Isabella Rossellini) who have been separated from their shell community and are attempting to create a new life for themselves in the apartment into which Fleischer Camp has just moved. The feature-length Marcel transforms the fun of the YouTube Marcel shorts into a more emotionally substantial comedy.

Between the early Marcel YouTube postings and books and Marcel the Shell with Shoes On (2022), Fleischer Camp supported himself by working in a wide variety of ways within commercial media and became increasingly interested in using filmmaking to explore aspects of how we consume media. His short feature, Fraud (fifty-five minutes, 2016), was itself a breakthrough and an important contribution to the burgeoning genre of films made from other films, and more specifically, the subgenre of often controversial films that recycle YouTube and Facebook postings. The experience of Fraud (available online at MUBI) depends to a considerable degree on its prospective audience coming to the film unarmed, or at most, “armed” with a familiarity with the YouTube fame of the early Marcel the Shell with Shoes On videos. Indeed, even this spoiler alert arms you more than I wish I had to. Let’s just say that Fraud, a collaboration with Jonathan Rippon, is an editing tour de force, a modern online-era David Holzman’s Diary (1967, directed by Jim McBride) aimed at critiquing our naiveté about media manipulation. As Fleischer Camp has put it, “With Fraud, I wanted to make a documentary that could prove to people that media manipulation can be even more dangerous than we imagine.” Anyone interested in Marcel the Shell with Shoes On and particularly its play with documentary tradition is sure to find Fraud interesting.

The feature Marcel has seemed bound for success; after all, nearly fifty million hits on the early videos—especially at this fragile moment in theatrical film history—had already evidenced the popularity of the film’s central character and his way of interacting with Fleischer Camp. And, of course, Jenny Slate has had her own considerable following. Nevertheless, all feature filmmaking is a gamble, and expanding a set of short YouTube postings into a feature required the human and financial investment that in most cases only major franchises—Marvel, Disney—can muster for a feature-length animation. And Marcel the Shell with Shoes On is virtually minimalist; would moviegoers really pay admission to see so little action? That it has done well is, in a small way during frustrating times, good news.

Cineaste first spoke with Fleischer Camp about the history of the Marcel the Shell project in November 2020, and again shortly before the feature film was released on June 7, 2022.—Scott MacDonald 

Cineaste: Your first successful project was Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, which went online in 2010. Can you tell me about how that video and its various spin-offs came to be?

Fleischer Camp: I made the Marcel video like I made anything else back then—cheaply, and for fun—and it happened to connect widely on the Internet and find a large audience. After that, Jenny Slate and I got to make two more short films and two children’s books, and now we’ve adapted Marcel as a feature!

Cineaste: How did you go from Marcel the Shell with Shoes On to Fraud, a very different kind of project? And how did you make a living between these projects?

Fleischer Camp: Actually, I feel that Marcel has a fair amount of overlap with Fraud, weird as that sounds. Like Fraud, Marcel has documentary dimensions. Some of the reason the early Marcel films were so disarming is because we were aping a documentary aesthetic. A lot of the material that became Marcel came from me and Jenny joking around within the format of a documentary interview, and later, as we developed the feature, it made sense to have that inform the aesthetic of the whole film. Plus, there’s a great comedic tension between the “looseness” of the documentary format and the very labor-intensive but also very surreal vibe of stop-motion. I love incorporating documentary approaches or techniques in ways that people haven’t seen before or using them to tell stories that aren’t usually told that way.  

Fraud mimics a documentary aesthetic to point out how malleable film footage is and how easy it is to manipulate our perceptions of what “truth” looks like. Marcel is borrowing that same aesthetic, but instead of revealing how easy it is to fool viewers, Marcel uses a documentary approach to reveal big emotional struggles: loss and recovery. Marcel is certainly not a “mockumentary,” a term I don’t like—I’ve never seen a “mockumentary” that takes its characters seriously. There is much comedy in the Marcel feature, but we’re also dealing with important issues.

I have a deep love of animation. I’m not a professionally trained animator; at first, I was just making stuff with my friends. The recent democratization of exhibition is incredible; YouTube and more recently social media are great ways to get your work seen.  

Cineaste: Did you go to film school?  

Fleischer Camp: Sort of. I was an undergrad at NYU and studied Film at Tisch, but I didn’t go to graduate school or get an MFA. 

Cineaste: To jump back a little further, how did you meet Jenny? She was already a show-business person by the time you two made the original Marcel piece. When did you begin your collaboration?

Fleischer Camp: We’d met on my first job out of college, at Plum TV. They produced original programming for resort locations in Nantucket and Vail, Colorado. For some reason, they thought the way to build an audience would be hiring Jenny and me and a few other people to create comedic content, sketch shows and so on. We started working together, then started dating and got married—then we ended our marriage. But we’ve continued to work together.

Cineaste: In the Marcel feature your character has moved into the apartment after a divorce. A personal reference?

Fleischer Camp: It is, and it isn’t. The real me and the fake me that I play in the film is a bit like where does the beach end and the ocean begin? The Marcel feature is personal for me, but there’s certainly embellishment; the feelings from that break-up were foundational in making this movie, but Marcel isn’t my literal autobiography.

Cineaste: When did you and Jenny start thinking about Marcel the Shell with Shoes On as a feature project?

Fleischer Camp: Well, we’re both passionate about feature films and when the three shorts became successful, we had meetings with all the studios and networks about expanding Marcel into a feature—but it seemed like they were only interested in grafting Marcel onto a more familiar action-adventure type film. I remember someone suggesting that we partner him with Ryan Reynolds, and they could fight crime together.  

We felt we knew Marcel, and the ideas we had for expanding on the Marcel films were obviously not going to be compatible with a studio. We said no to all those early offers and kept the character to ourselves for three or four years. Then, about seven years ago, we got serious and spoke to Liz [Elizabeth] Holm, who had worked on two of Jenny’s previous movies—Obvious Child [2014] and Landline [2017]. We knew it was going to be a challenge to take a three-minute wisp of a character and expand him in a way that wouldn’t feel stretched really thin, as if we were just trying to satisfy a market—that’s so common now in the streaming era.

Cineaste: In the original three Marcel pieces and now in the feature film, you develop an animated character who bears not the slightest resemblance to a being that actually exists—a shell (not a being who lives in a shell, but the shell itself!) with pink shoes—and engage with him as if you’re trying to shoot a Wiseman-esque direct-cinema documentary. In fact, Marcel critiques the idea of direct cinema itself, asking why he should share so much of himself when you, the filmmaker, want to share nothing. In one of the funniest moments in the feature, we see Marcel moving your camera into a position so he can film you—turning the tables on you-as-documentarian.  

It’s remarkable how easily we accept the absurdity of Marcel being an active being, impactive on his environment, and fill in all the blanks to make the action believable. Obviously, a shell can’t talk and this shell with no arms would have no way of moving a camera—but the humor is a function of the absurdity we accept. It’s a kind of self-reflexive humor. 

Fleischer Camp: I think the charm of Marcel has always been partly because he’s an animated character, but no one’s making a fuss about how he’s a talking shell or how tiny he is. I always felt that the funniest and most interesting thing to do with that character is to take him seriously and give him the dignified portrait he deserves.

Cineaste: In the feature-length Marcel you go beyond playing with documentary storytelling. You have Marcel, and yourself, meet one of the best-known figures in commercial television journalism, Leslie Stahl from CBS’s 60 Minutes.

Fleischer Camp: My integrating Leslie Stahl into the film came from needs within the story itself. In our minds, it was always Leslie Stahl and it was always 60 Minutes—and we got incredibly lucky. We were able to get the project in front of her and her team and they were willing to collaborate, to treat us the way that I always treat Marcel. They took us completely seriously.

Cineaste: In the feature, there are clips of a Brian Williams interview and of Conan O’Brien. Were there really snippets about the original Marcel pieces on television, and did 60 Minutes do one?  

Fleischer Camp: 60 Minutes never did a piece about Marcel, but those clips from Brian Williams and Conan were about the original videos, then the two books, becoming popular. Jenny went on Conan to promote one of the books, and Brian Williams came over to our apartment and did a little segment with us (it’s online). The idea of Leslie Stahl being central to the feature was based on our experiences when the original Marcel piece went viral. 

Cineaste: Several moments in the feature build on elements in those first three YouTube pieces. In the months when you and Jenny were talking about how to expand Marcel into a feature, were you accumulating new elements?  

Fleischer Camp: That’s a good way to put it. When we made the original shorts, the two of us were just fucking around making each other laugh. A lot of crafting went into those early pieces, but it was very clear to me that neither of us could sit down and write a full-length screenplay that would maintain the charm that seemed clear in the early shorts.

I was committed to the idea of making what we were doing as much like a documentary process as we could, while not ignoring the larger storytelling demands and the orchestration that a feature requires. We knew it couldn’t just be jokes, the way the early videos were. My task as director was to try to keep that in mind at every turn.

Nick Paley and I would write for several months; then we would record with Jenny for maybe a day or two. We’d shoot the scenes that we wrote, but we’d also improvise around what we’d written, and Jenny would think of some great jokes. There’d be all these happenstance discoveries that we never could have predicted. So, it was a narrative writing period, a couple days of recording, another writing period, another couple days recording—probably half a dozen times, until we’d created the whole story.

Cineaste: Where did you get the funding? At the end of the film there’s a long list of thank yous. Did you CrowdSource this film for financing early on? 

Fleischer Camp: No, I’m just full of gratitude! [Laughs] The film was almost entirely financed by Cinereach, the incredible nonprofit in New York. After we said no to those initial offers from the studios, we did another round—once we had a better idea of what the film would be—looking for financing. Again, we ran into constraints: people wanting to have a lot of creative control, wanting control over how the character is merchandised. None of the deals we were offered showed a faith in me as a filmmaker or in me and Jenny as creatives. So, though it was hard to do, we said no, and we waited until we found our partners at Cinereach, who not only financed us but also brought with them an incredible legacy and much experience in producing indie films and supporting artists. This is the only reason that the film is as close to my initial vision as it is. 

Cineaste: I was surprised that my students, who usually pay little attention to the logistics of production, recognize the A24 logo.

Fleischer Camp: In terms of quality control, A24 is the best distributor in indie film. They’ve only been around ten years, but they’ve done an incredible job making a name for themselves and have developed a cult-like following on social media. Your students probably know the films A24 has handled, such as Ex Machina [2014], Moonlight [2016], and Ladybird [2017].

Cineaste: Recently I watched Chris Sanders’s The Call of the Wild [2020], the live-action/animation film, and as I watched what seemed the unusually long end-credits sequence, I decided to count the number of people named—about 1800. It seemed unbelievable that so many people were needed to make what, on screen, looks like a relatively simple reality.

It occurs to me that the scenes in the feature Marcel could not seem simpler: there’s a little thing crawling around in what seem conventional spaces but looking at your very considerable credits sequence (I counted around five hundred names), I realized that the simplicity of Marcel is similarly deceptive—and more unusual than it may first seem.  

Fleischer Camp: Our animation director, Kirsten Lapore, says it actually takes much more effort to make things be invisible and effortless. We saw that in action. 

Cineaste: Also, I don’t think I’ve ever seen stop-motion used in the way you’ve used it. We see Marcel moving around but the spaces he’s moving around in are in normal motion. What seems so simple is actually mystifying.

Fleischer Camp: That is the most flattering compliment, Scott!

The short answer is, no, I don’t think there’s been a film that uses stop-motion animation in the way that we’ve used it, at least not since Monkeybone [2001], which is the last, closest film that we had as a reference. Technology has changed so much since 2000 and traditional stop-motion has become almost unusable. There are tons of films, like The Call of the Wild or any Marvel movie, where animation is integrated into mainstream narratives. But the animation is almost never stop-motion and it’s certainly never real stop-motion.  

The Marcel character began in stop-motion, and we’ve remained committed to it. There’s so much emotionality in stop- motion performance because it contains all these “imperfections”—it feels human and vulnerable. You can approximate the stop-motion look and I’ve seen good versions of that, such as The Lego Movie [2014]. But we set about creating something that was relatively unprecedented—a feature-length, live-action/stop-motion hybrid. There have been movies that contain maybe a stop-motion scene or two—the first Terminator [1984] comes to mind—but our characters (other than several insects) are all stop-motion. 

Cineaste: There are changes in Marcel between the early YouTube pieces and the feature. For example, his mouth works differently in the feature. In the early pieces, his mouth opens more vertically when he gets upset.

Fleischer Camp: I made the original Marcel in forty-eight hours. Various changes were necessary for him to star in a feature. Originally, he was literally just a block; he didn’t have any articulation at all. We needed to have his ankles move independently, and I’m sure his mouth shape changed.  

Cineaste: He’s more Keaton-esque now, more deadpan, doesn’t really smile or grin.

Fleischer Camp: True. We had to innovate a lot, and there was a lot of handholding between departments, crafts, skill sets, and filmmaker generations. A lot of the stop-motion pros are getting up in years, and a lot of the people who know how to digitally integrate things seamlessly are very young, so it was a real meeting of minds.  

We had to shoot all the live-action scenes and cut that entire film together; then, on the animation stages we mimicked the lighting to correspond perfectly to what we’d shot on the live-action locations. Our stop-motion director of photography, Eric Atkins, was on set every day of the live-action shoot, writing down the most intricate notes and mathematics about where Marcel is standing and what would be lighting him there. When Marcel is on the car ride and we drive past a tree, there’s a shadow cast on the dashboard from the tree. For every one of those shadows Eric and his team determined the exact timecode for when that tree passes and rigged up a flag on the animation stage to pass by at the exact moment the car passes by the tree. That kind of thing is done throughout the film.

I think one difficulty of making a movie like this is that you’re asking people to do “worse” than what they can do, less polished, less “good” than what they’re capable of; it’s hard to say to an animator who’s capable of completely fluid animation, beautiful animation, “Can you make it look kind of herky-jerky; could Marcel’s gait have a club-foot vibe?” 

Cineaste: I think that the power of the feature Marcel is its subtlety. Even that opening shot where you slowly fade in and then we get thirty seconds of nothing makes clear that this is a going to be a different kind of film. 

Fleischer Camp: I was definitely hoping to set that expectation. Someone told me they showed the film to their hyperactive seven-year-old and he calmed right down. If you look at Marcel next to something like The Minions, ours is a very different world, a more naturalistic world that requires patience and careful observation. 

Cineaste: Often we need to find Marcel! It’s like looking for a shell in a haystack. In most modern animated features, the screen is cluttered with giant beings in constant motion with blasting soundtracks. Marcel is comparatively minimalist, a very different theatrical experience, especially these days as studios usually to go over the top to try to entice viewers back into theaters. 

Fleischer Camp: In a weird way Marcel is a movie made for the theater, both because of our playing with scale, and because a lot of the moments are designed to be shared.

Cineaste: How did Isabella Rossellini get involved in this project?

Fleischer Camp: The reason we were drawn to Isabella—and the reason she said yes—is that she’s an artist in her own right. She’s best known as an actress, but she also has a Master’s in animal behavior; she writes and directs and stars in her own one-woman shows. And I’d seen her in the Sundance series, Green Porno [2008–2013], that she wrote and starred in, where she dresses up and imitates bugs in their natural habitat and demonstrates their mating behaviors. We thought, wow, if we could put this project in front of Isabella, she could bring so much to it! 

Luckily, that turned out to be true. She was intrigued and excited by the process. She said she’d never done anything before that required her to improvise. She’d done voice work obviously, but Marcel was recorded in a real location, not in a sound studio—we all had lavalier mikes taped to our foreheads when we were recording! Some of what ended up being Nana Connie’s core qualities are things that I found charming about Isabella herself, including the fact that she lives on a farm in New York State. A bit of B-roll of her giving me a tour around Nana Connie’s garden and showing me the strawberry is me just interviewing Isabella on her farm, talking about her real crops. 

Cineaste: Historically, the source of your relationship with Marcel is Gertie the Dinosaur [1914]. At the original screenings of Gertie, Winsor McCay was on stage speaking directly to Gertie on the screen, who was responding to what he was saying (the versions of Gertie now in circulation use intertitles). The interaction and the struggles between maker and “makee” are fundamental in animations from early on: there are the Koko the Clown cartoons in the Twenties and Duck Amuck [1953].

Fleischer Camp: Yes! These days, someone might think, oh, hybrid animation, that didn’t come along until relatively recently—but it’s right there at the inception of animated film.

I wonder if the struggle between animator and character has to do with the fact that by going through this laborious animation process, you develop a complex relationship with this made-up character—doing stop-motion is so frustrating; it’s as if the character is resisting you.  

Cineaste: A Quiet Place [2018] and A Quiet Place 2 [2021] end with no real conclusion except to make clear that there’s gonna be another film. At the end of Marcel, we see that there’s an entire community of shells. Are you fantasizing about doing the Ben-Hur of shell animation? 

Fleischer Camp: [Laughs] I was always nervous about the fact that I’d created only two of these figures; how am I going to make a community of shells for the film’s finale? I procrastinated doing research and development until the last possible moment—as tends to be my process!—then got to collaborate with all these great animation artists who worked with us. Soon, we’d birthed an entire community of shells. Now I wish they weren’t in the movie for only a few seconds!  

Cineaste: Marcel’s mother and father seem ready to step up and work with Marcel on a follow-up!

Fleischer Camp: If someone gives us the opportunity, I’ll hop on it.  

Scott MacDonald has been interviewing and writing about independent, experimental, and avant-garde filmmakers for more than forty years.

Copyright © 2022 by Cineaste Magazine 

Cineaste, Vol. XLVII, No. 4