After a series of short stop-motion animated films, loveable shoe-wearing shell Marcel is arriving on the big screen! Ahead of the UK release of Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, FILMHOUNDS spoke to Jenny Slate, the voice of Marcel who also co-wrote and co-produced the film as well as co-creating the character of Marcel the Shell alongside Dean Fleischer Camp. Slate told us all about the origins of Marcel's voice as well as how it feels to have had the film nominated for an Oscar.
If Marcel could meet anyone, whether that's someone fictional or real, they could be alive, or dead, who would you love to see him meet? Personally? I'd love a Marcel/Paddington Bear crossover. I think the two would get on so well.
That would be so nice. You might have nailed it actually. Let's see…who else. Maybe Wall-E? I love Wall-E so much. Yeah, I'm going with Wall-E…although now I'm just diving into that, there are so many possibilities but yeah, that would be that would be really, really nice.
What made you realise you had something with Marcel that was big enough to take him from a series of shorts to a feature?
I think it was just a really, really gradual process of figuring out where he could live. And first we thought ‘oh, I don't know, maybe it could be a TV show, it could be episodic thing'. And basically, the more that we started thinking about, ‘what if Marcel generally had a larger story', the more we kept thinking of things, and it was very fun and very easy to build that story. And more and more characters kept coming in. I think honestly, the hardest thing I felt in writing the film with, with Dean, when we first wrote the treatment, the initial plan for the story was that there was too much story and there was too much backstory, and it was just such a big world. It just always felt very easy to expand. I think that's because it was so fun.
That's one of the things about the film, it's so fun, and wholesome and there are so few films at the minute that are just so incredibly wholesome. How do you go about creating and writing a film that is so wholesome and nice without it being boring? When you have a film with so little antagonism in it, it can easily slip into being boring with not a log going on, but Marcel never feels like that.
That's very true. Dean likes to describe Marcel as a film whose only villain is the slow march of time itself. And I think that is so funny and so right on. I don't know, I mean, everyone has a different opinion of how you make a good story or how to make the story good, but I just happen to feel that real kindness, kindness that takes thought, kindness that requires risk in order to be actually kind and loving is just not boring. It's different than being basic. It's different than being sweet in a shallow way.
Kindness is a super complicated thing. And a lot of times it involves strange compromise. It involves the acceptance of doubt, it involves the acceptance of loss and I think that Dean and I, and [co-writers] Nick Paley and Liz Holm and Kirsten Lepore [the animation director] , for all of us who made this film creatively, none of us have any interest in hurting anyone. Maybe we want to show what it feels like to be sad. Or what it feels like to work through grief. But that's because we want to be close to people as a collective, as a collective of artists we want to be close to people and I think the work reflects that hospitality.

When you're trying to create something so profound and something about kindness, is it difficult to try and put that into something so small with a tiny eye and shoes on and not a human character?
No, I don't think it's difficult at all. I mean, not for me because the first thing that started in terms of the creation of Marcel was a set of feelings of feeling small, of wanting to be heard. Of feeling kind of weird. Of having something to say and not really wanting to have to change what that is but really feeling rather minimised and then that set of feelings, just because I guess I am who I am, I paired it in my normal life with this voice. I started doing the silly voice to talk about how I felt and to sort of… to sort of be playful within a state of being that I felt like I had no control over.
I didn't feel good about myself. I felt small. That's how I felt and rather than trying to erase that or saying ‘ughh, stop feeling that way'. I just tried to get more into, and express more of what it felt like to be that way. And that's how I eventually kind of loosened myself out of it and maybe came back up to my normal size. So it's in the origins, that there is a largeness in the smallness. You just kind of have to break your own norms in your mind about where largeness exists. And so, yeah, it always just felt to me like Marcel is a character that has a great scope of emotion. And a great talent for expressing that, very simply. I think he expresses things pretty simply. And it was just built in, so it didn't feel very difficult.
You mentioned how Marcel was this voice of you feeling really small, and a way that you felt. Do you find yourself slipping into Marcel and that voice when you're not voicing him for film and just in general life?
I don't really need to do it the way that I needed to do it 10 years ago, when I created the voice. But I definitely slip into the voice of Marcel just for other stuff. I just do it now just to entertain my daughter or even when I'm alone, I like to sing covers in the voice of Marcel because I just love his singing voice.
That'd be great to hear, I think you should release a whole album of Marcel covers!
Yeah, I agree!
So it wasn't a challenge at all to come back to the voice of Marcel having done the shorts a while ago, you could just slip straight back into it?
Yeah, and that's because it never really stopped. We made the shorts between 10 and seven or eight years ago and kind of went right into starting into recording the movie. And because it is true, I do talk as Marcel a lot, I never stopped.

What's the process like of making a mockumentary style film, but one that requires so much detail and so much work into creating each shot because of the animation? Was there much room for improvisation and being spontaneous or because of the rigid structure of making it was there not that ability?
Dean and Kirsten really created a certain type of filmmaking process. Dean created a process that worked so that we could improvise a lot. We locked all of the audio before any animation began. And then there was maybe some ADR- additional dialogue recording- along the way just to sharpen some stuff, but a lot of that was then done in in voiceover. So, it wasn't like over the mouth but it took three years to get the audio play as it was, before we even started animating at all. And that is so that we could really improvise a lot, so that the scenes, although they were planned out, and there was there was certainly some like actual writing, of course, lots of it, but we could still improvise within that, and loosen and make sure that we just made it seem really natural and that you might forget that this is actually a fully animated film, that you might really believe it is a documentary.
When you watch it, everything that comes from Marcel's mouth just feels so incredible and perfect. And at the same time, it feels perfectly written but perfectly natural and spontaneous as well. Could you talk me through that writing process and the improvisation process and what that's like a bit more please?
So first Dean and I just wrote a really long treatment of what we thought the movie would be. And then we did an initial recording where we just improvise through the entire treatment, we improvised through the entire treatment. Then Nick and Dean over many rounds of recording and re-recording would listen to what we had recorded. Then they would be like, ‘okay, well, that sounds good, but the tone of the scene actually should be a lot lighter'. And then they would write in some jokes, and they would, edit down the audio and realise that ‘oh, this thing that we thought would be a major plot point, just isn't that interesting or doesn't really work' and so they would change the story.
Then we would go back and we would all re-record and I would improvise within the new plan for the scene. And some things are just purely improvised moments that were put into other scripted moments. There's really a layered mix of writing and improv and writing and improv and writing and improv and final writing.
I can't imagine there are many other films that are made like that. Is that a difficult process for you?
Oh, I loved it. And I also just felt really lucky because I just kind of get to improvise and improvise and improvise and Dean and Nick are really the ones that have to listen to everything and make sense out of it. It's not like I'm not writing because I also am writing it with them, but a lot of my writing is through the improv and developing the initial ideas.
I think, Dean and Nick had to really deal with some of that strain of really sitting down and making sure that the story is exciting and makes sense and is touching. And then I just feel really lucky because then they come to me with a cleaned up and better written version. And then I can do more of my specific work and I can improvise even more specifically when they would give it back. But they just did so much writing on their own that I benefited from it as a performer. But I think it works both ways. I think I did a lot of improvising that makes them feel softer and more conversational. And some of those improvs are some of my proudest work.

Watching the film, there's no way of knowing- other than for you and the rest of the team making it- what was improvised and what was completely scripted, it's all just seamlessly interwoven together. How have you reacted to the film's award successes and the Oscar nominations?
I'm really, genuinely happy and really proud. I described it as it kind of feels like it's my birthday all the time. Like, when I was younger, and it was my birthday- now I still feel this way too, actually weirdly it hasn't burned off- but when it was my birthday, I just felt like only nice things are going to happen to me today and I felt this special feeling that maybe you have when you are reminded that like you actually were born.
You know that, you're lucky enough that you were born and you got a life, a life to live. That's how I feel about our film being recognised. It's like, let me remind you, you made this work. You made it and they saw it, and they are telling you that they enjoyed it. And that to me just feels like, at once it feels right, because I stand by our work and I do think it's what we intended to make and so I'm incredibly proud and grateful to all the people that helped to make this project what it is, but there's also part of me that just feels like ‘what are the chances that we actually got to do all of this?' It's a gift.
You should be really proud of it, it's an incredible film. Often animation is wrongly considered to be a medium that's a bit inferior, for children and not on the same level as live action and other films. What do you have to say about that view of animated films?
Oh, I mean, there's so many different styles to do every type of film. I mean, there's a lot of live action that is, you know, shallow and doesn't have anything to offer. And then there's a lot of live action that is profound and will change your life. I think that's the same for animation. I think it's the same for any genre. Everything is viable. Everything has the potential to be nourishing and touching and elegant and profound. It's just about which artist is at the centre.
Marcel has had a feature film now, so what's next for him? Are there talks of a sequel, or series or anything else? What's happening next?
I don't know what's next but, I can only say that I love performing as Marcel and that it really does something for me as a performer. It makes me feel so happy. It always feels new. I always learn more about myself so I do hope that there's more to come but I don't know what that would be yet.
Marcel the Shell with Shoes On is released at UK & Irish cinemas from 17th February 2023
Read our review of Marcel the Shell with Shoes On here