Marcel the Shell With Shoes On is the perfect end-of-summer movie

Marcel in the Criterion Collection WHEN

As regular No One Asked readers know, I’ve been loving the summer movie series around Columbus. Many local theaters show older movies for free or very low cost in the mornings, when they’d otherwise not have a movie running. Quite often, these movies are, uh…not very good. Well, okay, I’m being uncharitable here. Quite often these movies are whatever came out last summer, and maybe that’s like the seventh Trolls movie (I don’t think there are seven Trolls movies, but you get the point). But it all depends on where you’re seeing the movie! The Gateway’s Book to Film series is perfectly curated—we saw The Last Unicorn for free last weekend. What a bonkers movie! And the Grandview Theater also has a delightful selection. This summer we’ve seen Jumanji and Transformers One (better than you would think!) and we had to miss a showing of Flow. They closed out their summer series last week with Marcel the Shell with Shoes On (2022), and I arranged our schedule around it.

Technically we’ve seen this film before, but my son was a much younger child then, and every year makes a huge difference for kids when it comes to understanding movies. I wanted to see it again with him even though I remembered it being pretty quiet and I’d say that, in general, kids do not always appreciate a super quiet film. But part of appreciating quiet films comes from practice—do any of us come out of the womb yearning for Terrence Malick?—and there’s no better time to start that practice than when you’re young and your brain hasn’t been poisoned by unboxing videos and YouTube shorts.

Also, we’ve seen some real stinkers and I wanted a palate cleanser. “Family” films or children’s movies can be bad in a way that’s unique to the genre, a way that you wouldn’t believe if you don’t watch them on a regular basis. Which is not to say that there aren’t many, many wonderful family films out there, but the terribleness stings extra when it’s a movie made for impressionable young minds. I will never get over how horrific The Garfield Movie (2024) was—a lazy, desperate cash grab that feels unbearably cynical when you imagine that everyone involved just figured, “Kids don’t need a movie that’s interesting. Or smart. Or funny. Or one that looks good.”

But Marcel the Shell with Shoes On is not a children’s movie. It isn’t necessarily even a family movie, which is not to say it’s not appropriate for a family. But you don’t need a family to watch it (in contrast, you absolutely need a child present to watch Minions because there’s no reason to otherwise). Marcel the Shell with Shoes On is something else entirely: a quiet, leisurely-paced meditation on mortality, loneliness, and hope that fits squarely into my favorite genre, Nothing Happens Cinema.

You probably remember Marcel from the YouTube videos, which are silly and cute and, crucially, short.

Many things work well in short form, but the transition to a feature film seems trickier. I was going to include examples here and say, “like an SNL sketch,” but if I’m being honest I’ve seen and enjoyed many SNL sketch movies so I guess I need a better example. But here’s what I found so special and unique about Marcel: it doesn’t try to fill the movie with plot.

Having seen countless family movies, I can say that I don’t always enjoy their conflict-filled plots. Not to bring it back to Garfield again, but that’s the best example of a film that creates a fully artificial conflict as a vehicle for a character, with no regard to whether or not the character even fits in that world. If I described to you the entire plot of Garfield, how Garfield meets the father who abandoned him (?) and then they have to steal a bunch of milk (??), you wouldn’t believe me…nary a Monday in sight. It had, and I realize even as I say this how ridiculous it sounds, nothing to do with Garfield. It was just a series of problems with no logic or fun involved.

Even as a kid, I was stressed the heck out by most kids’ movies. They always have to leave home, or get separated from their family. Can we not just, you know, focus on some shots of trees?

Well. Enter Marcel. If Marcel was focused on being a children’s movie, the filmmakers could have ramped up his personality to be a bit goofier, a bit bigger, and perhaps even removed him from his home. But…they didn’t. That’s not to say there’s not a quest for Marcel. That’s not to say there aren’t bigger aspects of our world brought into his small one. But 60 Minutes and Lesley Stahl, somehow, feel like a delightfully quirky addition to Marcel’s world, unlike the Walmart app usage in the Garfield movie that made me think the film had ended and I was watching a post-credits ad.

(Okay I’m actually done talking about Garfield now.)

The trailer for Marcel opens with a shot of trees and really communicates how much natural light and nature you get in this film. Not to be dramatic, but this is a visual relief in a landscape that’s full of neon and loud noises. Do you know how many times I’ve seen the Smurfs trailer this summer? I’ve lost count. It’s a visual crime. And an auditory one. And a bad use of Rihanna’s time.

The trailer is good, but like most trailers, it makes the film it represents appear much more fast-paced than it actually is. In the film, there’s so much silence. So many small noises. I love the Phil Collins song featured in the trailer, but that song is not in the movie. Instead, you get Marcel singing “Peaceful Easy Feeling” by the Eagles and a perfect, so so hilarious scene with a squirrel set to Shakira’s “Whenever, Wherever.”

The film is about Marcel, who is a shell (with shoes on). He lives in an Airbnb with his Nana Connie, even though “it’s pretty much common knowledge that it takes at least 20 shells to have a community.” There were other shells, but they were taken away in a series of events that’s perhaps better explained via viewing the film. Marcel is interviewed by documentary filmmaker Dean (played by real-life director Dean Fleischer Camp), who is staying in the Airbnb after going through a breakup…which is a little bit of a meta twist for those of us who are perhaps too obsessed with Jenny Slate, the voice of Marcel, and her divorce from Fleischer Camp. Do you think you could make an entire movie with your ex-husband? I certainly could not, and I don’t even have one. I don’t want to focus too much on this aspect of the movie because it’s not really my point, but it feels disingenuous to not mention it at all because I’m a very big fan of Jenny Slate’s work, I’m currently reading her husband’s book about Thoreau, and I had to pause writing this piece to google “Jenny Slate sweaters” just because I love her style.

The movie is, ostensibly, about Marcel’s desire to find the rest of his community, which makes it sound like your typical children’s movie quest. But it feels much more inspired by an actual documentary, by the quiet bits of watching a person go about their day, than it does by any animated film of the past thirty years. It’s not like I’m comparing Marcel the Shell with Shoes On to the works of Frederick Wiseman, but it has next to nothing in common with Minions. I found this really lovely article where Fleischer Camp explained some of the film’s inspirations and it’s enlightening. I didn’t even think of Creature Comforts, which we just watched with our son recently! The piece also includes this: “We have a lot of choices at the box office this summer, but I feel confident saying you’ll find no other movie as uplifting, honest, and genuinely-funny-in-the-real-actual-way-that-life-can-be-funny as ours. It will rejuvenate you. It will reconnect you to the source. It will move you to tears and beyond them, beyond anything else in theatres this summer. Come at me, Minions dipshits, I fucking dare you.”

I love “it will reconnect you to the source” as a way of explaining what this film does. Marcel, to me, feels like the end of summer, like August’s slow fade into September. There’s so much silence in this film, so much grass. If whatever blockbuster kids’ movie of the summer feels like the height of July and cannonballing into the pool, Marcel feels like lying on the ground and looking up at the leaves. It’s the end of summer, the knowledge of death, the awareness that all things—good and bad—must end. Death is unavoidable, but life isn’t bleak. There’s beauty and hope to be found in connection, even when that connection starts out as an unwanted intrusion.

In one perfect scene, Nana Connie (voiced by Isabella Rossellini) reads Philip Larkin’s poem “The Trees.” Here we go with trees again!

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too.
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

Show me another family movie that’s going to give you something so beautiful. The only movie I can think of that’s even close to being as tree-filled and quiet and death-focused is My Neighbor Totoro, the ultimate in quiet family movies.

This was a quick one because my main goal here is to convince you to watch Marcel before summer ends. The movie made me laugh out loud, check a book of Philip Larkin poems out from the library, tear up, appreciate my own life, and want to watch more films. My son enjoyed it, I think, although admittedly his own tastes run a little broader (his favorite movies are Hundreds of Beavers and The Sandlot, but luckily he’ll focus on slower movies too). It’s, annoyingly, not on a streaming service right now but you can rent it and my library has several copies, so yours might too. I’m grateful to the Grandview Theater for screening it so that I had a chance to see it at the perfect time. It really did reconnect me to the source, and it did what all great films do: it reminded me of the beauty and pain of real life.

Let me know if you decide to watch it. We’re in full-on back to school mode over here, so very soon I’ll be back to posting more consistently. Apologies for any typos, but I am a real human just like you and I certainly don’t employ a copyeditor for my Substack. See you soon. xo