“Marcel the Shell” began as a series of lovingly crafted homemade shorts for YouTube by Dean Fleischer Camp and Jenny Slate. So when it came time to give the diminutive breakout star the feature film treatment — in A24’s “Marcel the Shell With Shoes On,” now playing in theaters nationwide — some technical concerns needed to be addressed.
“The challenge for me was always, ‘How do we maintain that authenticity and the texture from the shorts?’,” Camp recently told The Times. “Because the danger, when you’re dealing with a bigger budget, is that in polishing it up, you might sand down all the things that made it wonderful.”
To ensure that wasn’t the case, he enlisted independent stop-motion storyteller Kirsten Lepore as his animation director to lend her expertise to the meticulous frame-by-frame technique. Her seasoned ability for subtlety of movement in the performance of stop-motion characters was paramount in the decision.
