With how many films I actively seek out regardless of it sparking any initial interest for me personally, especially at this time of the year, trailers don’t really register with me these days. I don’t pay much attention to them outside of the context of the cinema, and even then, I usually just end up seeing the same two or three on repeat for a good few weeks’ worth of sessions.
The trailer for this film, though, is a major exception to that. As much as I'm starting to realise that getting me to cry over a piece of media isn’t that difficult to do, being the big softy I am, I can’t recall another instance where I got to that stage just from the trailer. Because of that, this is one of those situations where, even if I weren’t going out to see every movie I can, this would still be a priority to check out as soon as possible. And when I finally did… I… I get the feeling I’ll be processing this one for a while.
Based on a viral set of short films that showed up online about a decade ago, this is a mockumentary about the titular sentient shell. Nothing in the way of explanation as to how something like this could come to life in-film, but judging by the vocal efforts of Jenny Slate along with the character design, my head canon is that he was grown in a lab in an effort to make the scientifically-proven cutest thing in the universe. Slate’s delivery strikes that perfect balance where there’s a real childlike perspective on the world, but it doesn’t come across like it’s coming from an adult’s ideal of what that means; it’s surprisingly genuine. There’s just something about this little guy that seems designed to fire up the instinctual drive to protect it, like it was your own child or younger sibling, because something this pure and innocent needs to be preserved.
The way the stop-motion animation is handled to bring Marcel to life is quite subtle, but has a serious impact on how the film looks and feels. The animation team is led by the Chiodo Brothers, who seem to operate exclusively on the weirder ends of popular American animation. Large Marge from Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure? That was them. The puppets from Team America: World Police? Also them. Killer Klowns From Outer Space? Written and directed by them. And here, they build on the simple aesthetics of the short films to further emphasise the cuteness of the whole thing, along with maintaining the smooth integration of animation with the live-action footage surrounding it.
Most of the film takes the form of interview footage between Marcel and writer/director Dean Fleischer Camp as the interviewer, and what is shown is quite mundane across the board. We see the house Marcel lives in with her grandmother Connie (Isabella Rossellini), the odd bits of furniture she has re-purposed for her own ends (i.e. two slices of bread as a bed, a combination of a stand mixer and a rope made out of discarded hair to help with gathering fruit, a dusty table as a makeshift ice-skating rink, etc.), and Marcel answering (and frequently asking in return) questions about how she sees the world around her. There’s an emphasis on life in the moment, about appreciating the little things, and while some of it is transplanted directly from the shorts, like Marcel’s heartwarming reason for why she smiles, it doesn’t lose any of its potency in that transfer.
What helps with the reuse of certain quotes is that the script here effectively expands on the ideas of the initial shorts, bringing a pervasively bittersweet mood to what the audience is shown. Underneath all the homespun ingenuity and forlorn looks out the house’s many windows, there’s a great absence. Namely, that of the rest of Marcel’s family, who were displaced after a tragic accident two years earlier. All of this, and possibly even his agreeing to be in this documentary in the first place, to try and fill in that absence. To regain that sense of community, of true connection. And by including the online impact of those initial shorts into the narrative proper, a sharp demarcation is drawn between the idea of having an audience, people who will observe your story, and having a connection, where they truly care about where that story goes.
But for as much as this made me laugh, shed a few tears, and just generally want good things to happen for Marcel as she tries to reconnect with her family, part of me admittedly felt a bit underwhelmed. I mean, I tend to gravitate towards films that have all these layers to their stories, examining several different high-brained ideas at once; the kind of stuff that leaves my brain with a lot to chew on. By contrast, these kinds of straight-forward mindfulness exercises don’t tend to cling to me as strongly.
However, the more I thought about that, the closer I came to realising something major: This very existence, one built out of appreciating what is here rather than continually pining for more, is what I have been seeking in my own life. Beyond the meme value of being able to say “Jeff Bridges as The Dude is my lord and saviour”, I have taken the idea of Dudeism and Taoism in general as a genuine path to walk in life because it aspires to that level of peaceful existence. Hell, for a while now, I’ve had the feeling that I had actually attained that, after a long period of cultivation. And then I see something like this, and remember that it’s not a destination to reach; it’s a way to live in each and every moment.
This… was not what I was expecting to get out of this. Sure, just from the reaction I had from the trailer, I was expecting this to hit me squarely in the feels, and it most assuredly did. But when I leave the cinema with a mild feeling of disappointment that leads into a proper moment of soul-searching, and feeling like I’ve made an actual reconnection with the ideals I personally aspire to in my day-to-day, I have to recognise that there is something quite special about this film. It’s the stop-motion ideal of connection with the world around us, but filtered through such an unshakable purity of vision and emotionality as to, as cheesy as it sounds, make one reconsider how that world looks and how they fit into it.
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