Marcel the Shell with Shoes On

 

Dean Fleischer-Camp's utterly beguiling Marcel the Shell with Shoes On is disarming in the intricacy of its craftsmanship and the sweetness of its message about existential matters liked connectedness and hopefulness.

Fleischer-Camp plays a filmmaker who takes up residence where Marcel lives with his grandmother and where is born the idea for, first, YouTube shorts about Marcel that become internet phenomena and eventually an interview with 60 Minutes' Lesley Stahl. A host of life lessons -- self-reliance, individuation, loss -- are learned along the way. See

The animated creatures and the beautiful scaled-down, jerry-rigged world they inhabit will undoubtedy fascinate children, and the words Marcel (voiced by co-creator Jenny Slate) exchanges with Fleischer-Camp, who plays himself, and Marcel's Nana Connie (voiced by Isabella Rossellini) are infused with brilliant humor and poetry.

Adults will be touched by Marcel's unvarnished innocence and wonder as he and Dean try to find the other members of his family, who were whisked away one day and never seen again.

Marcel the Shell with Shoes On delivers the tenderest, and most needed, of messages -- though we are individuals as Marcel affirms in the first minutes of the film -- we are also community and need one another.