How Dean Fleischer-Camp Brought Marcel the Shell With Shoes On to Life

It's rare a stop-motion movie makes it into cinemas, even rarer that two are on release at the same time. So Dean Fleischer-Camp can't help but laugh at the idea that someone could go out this weekend and double-bill Mad God and his film, Marcel the Shell With Shoes On. "The two total ends of the spectrum on stop-motion offerings," he said.

It's hard to imagine two films more diametrically opposite in tone. FX legend Phil Tippett's Mad God is a deviant, disturbing masterpiece. Marcel – spinning out from the 2010 short and its two sequels that Fleischer-Camp made with comedian Jenny Slate – is a sweet and quietly funny story of a young shell called Marcel (voiced by Slate). After his community mysteriously disappears, all save for his grandmother, Nana Connie (Isabella Rossellini), he befriends a lonely documentarian (played by Fleischer-Camp, who also co-wrote and directed the feature).

It's a long way from Mad God's gleeful depravity, but what they do have in common is that they debunk the old and frustrating idea that the only audience for animated movies is tinies and tweens. While Mad God is definitely not for minors, Marcel casts a broader net. And, like many animators, Fleischer-Camp rolls his eyes at that pigeonholing of a medium – one that even infamously reached to this year's Oscars, where the hosts mocked animation as just for kids. "In America," he said, "we don't seem to have developed an adult animated movie market for some reason. But there's an animated movie in everyone's top three or five or whatever, and movies are more animated hybrids than they aren't these days. Every Marvel movie has so many visual effects, and those are all artists who are animating those performances."

Even among the many forms of animation, stop-motion is arguably the most inherently laborious, and indie filmmaking is a lot of "hurry up and wait." So Fleischer-Camp isn't just enjoying the top 10 success of Marcel (for which he credited distributor A24 for getting non-arthouse audiences to see an arthouse film). He's appreciating having the film out after seven years of production and development. He said, "For years now I've wanted to quote jokes and lines from the movie to people, and I could only do it for this very small group of close friends and collaborators, or no one would know what I was talking about. So it's really wonderful."

Austin Chronicle: In the shorts the animation was simpler, and that was part of the charm, but every time you transition from a short to a feature you have to scale up. So how, as a filmmaker, do you make it more complicated without sacrificing that charm?

Dean Fleischer-Camp: So much of the charm is in how crude the animation is, and how awkward and staccato his gait is, and the danger with a bigger budget is that you sand off all the parts that are great about it. If you just spray money at an idea, it just tends to come off smooth and polished, but without any personality. So I was really focused on that, on how to preserve the integrity of it, and the documentary authenticity of it – the rugged edges.

Part of the reason that I wanted to do real stop-motion instead of CG, even though CG can mimic the aesthetic of stop-motion, is that what it can't do is anticipate the mistakes. Stop-motion is this really difficult process, and it's all hand-done, and it's really labor intensive, so it's imperfect. It's impossible to produce something that's super-duper polished, and I thought it was important to make all the characters – except for the bugs – stop-motion, to bake in errors that are lovely and add a real emotionality to the performance. Especially for characters like this that are making do in a world like this that wasn't made for them.

I animated the first trio of shorts myself, and I'm just a self-taught animator. I'm mostly a live-action director, and so when we were scaling up I obviously wanted there to be more flexibility and better animation, so Kirsten Lepore, our animation director, and then our entire team of animators are all incredibly talented professional stop-motion animators. So the challenge for me as a director is that I'm asking them to be less good at animating. We obviously wanted it to look smoother, but we didn't want to lose all of it, we didn't want it to look totally fluid.

Maybe you know this if you know stop-motion animators, the difference in editing on ones versus editing on twos versus editing on fours. It's how often you change the character's position. So if you're editing on twos, you move them and take two frames, move them again, take two frames, and it gives them a bit more of a staccato motion. Most of the time, that's what we did with Marcel, but first I thought, "Oh, we should shoot on ones, because it's a documentary and that's how life is." But then we did some tests of Marcel moving around and it looked so creepy. It was a horror film, and it was amazing to see how that tiny little decision had such a huge impact.

AC: And now, as an animator, you're one degree of separation from Killer Clowns From Outer Space, with having the Chiodo Brothers working on Marcel.

DF-C: The Chiodo Brothers were so cool and amazing to work with, and they have stories for every one of those productions they worked on. But that was their first movie, and they produced it, directed it, they did it themselves, and it's such a lasting, indelible movie. It scared the living shit out of me as a child. I have specific nightmares about scenes from that movie, and I think we'd already met with them a few times before I even realized that a couple of the puppets from Killer Clowns were in the conference room we were meeting in.

Their studio's in the [San Fernando] Valley, and this stuff is all over the walls. There's puppets from movies you recognize, and then there's some crazy massive T. rex head that you don't even know what they used it for. It's like visiting the Henson workshop.

AC: Going back to the inception of Marcel, it's those three elements: the shell, the eye, the shoes. It's so simple and perfect. Where did that come from?

DF-C: I can't take credit because it's a shell, and nature's an incredible designer because everything we see in nature has evolved into its perfect form over millions of years. We had to 3D-print a lot of shells for this, and it was so mind-bogglingly difficult to really mimic the beauty of spirals, the perfection of a real shell. It gave me a lot of respect for the natural way that shells get made.

I have a pretty stripped-down aesthetic anyway when I try to make things. I try to figure out what's extraneous, and that goes for the story, the writing, everything. Nick Paley, my co-writer, and I literally had a sticky note up in our office that said, "What will suffice?" which is an organizing principle. Every time we think, "OK, we have to have a car chase," well, does it have to be a car chase, or can it be a scooter chase? Does it have to be a scooter chase, or can it be a foot chase? OK, does it have to be a foot chase, or can it just be darting eyes?

And that's the M.O. of Marcel, and when we were designing the other creatures of his universe we started out without too many design rules. But what I realized as we were working on these is that they had to have shoes, and they have to be from an object, but you can't add more than two other features that don't occur naturally. All the characters that did have more articulated legs or were more humanoid, it just was overcomplicated. It didn't feel streamlined or irreducible. It felt like junk, actually, and especially when you're making creature from actual junk, too many bits of junk means it's just a gross junk monster now.

AC: Somewhere Stan Winston just went, "Somebody say 'gross junk monster'?"

DF-C: [Laughs] Exactly!

AC: I've talked to a lot of filmmakers who, when it comes to making a creature or anything fantastical, some just instinctually know what works, and others build a full world guide, with an evolutionary tree. Where are you on that scale? If you did an old Visible Man see-through model, would you know what he looked like inside, or is that a mystery even to you?

DF-C: You have to give yourself those rules. I have a lot of strictures and rules in my head about how we branched out in the community, and then when we started bringing on other designers we had to create a big brief that articulates those ideas. It was really a learning process to figure out, because things still have to function. Even if you don't know what those behind-the-scenes rules are, you can tell when there aren't rules. You can tell when it doesn't follow intuitively, or it doesn't follow logic.

There is a very specific world philosophy – in my head, anyway – that if any small thing is neglected for long enough or forgotten about, it will eventually get tired of sitting under the couch or in a junk drawer and sprout a spirit to walk itself out of there. So the rule became that it can only be objects that you would find in an old junk drawer, or under a couch, or something like that.

AC: And then there are the wolf spiders. I want a spinoff for just them.

DF-C: I'm so in love with the design that we settled on, and the performance that the VFX artists – it's just so charming and funny.

AC: And then there's Connie's relationship with the bugs, and especially the ladybug, and the idea that the only things that are on the same scale as the shells also see them.

DF-C: Originally the ladybug was a frog. I grew up with tons of frogs in Virginia – they were just roaring in summer – and frogs always seem to hold a magical power for me.

I haven't been asked this before, and I'm almost reluctant to touch it because I don't want to dissect it and kill it, but at some point we started thinking, "We all have to depend on each other," and Marcel and Connie were left suddenly by themselves on this kind of desert island, alone in this house, and they have to forge a new way to live. We just felt like they would be on the lookout for any kind of resource, and the bugs felt like, "Oh, OK, maybe they've tried to make them their livestock." Or, "Part of our problem is that we don't have this big community anymore. So labor is in short supply." So there was sort of a logic that began with that and the gardening, and that Nana Connie should have a shorthand with them, and she likes them, and that was fun to develop.

I think the fact that the ladybug becomes this spirit or something that leads her into the afterlife in a really peaceful way, my memory is that we were writing her as becoming more and more senile, and we were writing Connie as becoming more of a specialist with the gardening and the bugs, and that came from the fact that Isabella [Rossellini] has a master's in animal behavior. She has this wealth of knowledge and curiosity about wildlife and animals and chickens, so we started writing towards that, and she would sometimes improvise things around that, based on her actual real knowledge. So it made sense that, when we were writing this disappearing act that she does when she passes on, that that would be a comforting thing for her. I can't say necessarily it would be a ladybug if you or I were to pass on in that world. Maybe it's just for her. But I love that [it] works a line where you're not sure if it's magical realism or not.

I think it's the only shot that there's not a documentary motivation for. It's almost like it breaks that rule at that one moment, because obviously Dean's not with her, so it gives it a detached or mystical vibe to it.

AC: My thought was that the ladybug makes sure that the camera is running so that Dean can let Marcel know that Connie is OK.

DF-C: You just gave me chills.

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Marcel the Shell With Shoes On is in cinemas now. Find showtimes and listings here.