The movies are going through a phase in which franchised or generic material – or anything at all – is becoming ever more soullessly produced as “content”. And yet there is at the same time a reaction, a yearning for something real and organic in the movies, something with the handcrafted imperfection and waywardness that can’t be nurtured in the corporate environment. A kind of “real ale” movement. Superhero movies are beginning to pall and Pixar animations are starting to seem too programmatic.
This wildly popular stop-motion animation is the ultimate beneficiary of this new hunger: Dean Fleischer Camp and Jenny Slate’s film Marcel the Shell With Shoes On is so airy, so tiny, so eccentric, so exotic, that it appears to break every rule of instant relatability. It whimsically avoids the easy grasp and the elevator pitch. Even the title is baffling and forgettable – are the first and third words supposed to rhyme? – requiring two or three repetitions before it can be committed to memory.
