Here is a genuine oddity: a weird little hothouse flower of a film that looks as if it might crumple at the slightest breath of wind – but is actually very resilient. It’s a quirky stop-motion animation, developed from a series of online short films, whose comedy frequency takes a little time to tune into. You have to wait a bit to hear its batsqueak, and before this happens there is a real and understandable danger that you will simply find it insufferably annoying. The film appears to exist in the Venn diagram overlap between twee and hipster, which isn’t for everyone – but let it grow on you, and there is a real sweetness and gentleness in its absurdity, a savant innocence and charm.
The idea is that the film’s director, Dean Fleischer Camp, is staying in an Airbnb after the collapse of his marriage – and this house has only become available for rental because the couple who own it have split up. Fleischer Camp becomes aware that there is someone else in the house: a tiny mollusc called Marcel (voiced by Jenny Slate) with a single, blinking eye and dinky little human shoes. Marcel is a calm, childlike figure who talks with absolute candour in his tiny voice to Dean about his own problems and Dean’s.
Marcel also has to look after his elderly grandmother, Nana Connie, another single-eye mollusc (voiced by Isabella Rossellini) with a love of Philip Larkin. But it seems that when the owners broke up and moved out, they inadvertently took the rest of Marcel’s entire extended family of molluscs with them in their luggage. So Marcel, heartened by the way his adventures have become hugely popular on YouTube, is able to get Lesley Stahl from TV’s 60 Minutes to help him track down his family.
All this should in theory be intensely irritating, but somehow it’s really funny and heartwarming. Dean’s relationship with this imaginary tiny mollusc is absolutely convincing, and their odd-couple rapport is so strong it takes an effort of will to remember that Marcel doesn’t exist. He’s not big enough to hug … but I sort of felt like it.
• Marcel the Shell With Shoes On is released on 17 February in UK cinemas.
