Several years back, Jenny Slate and Dean Fleischer-Camp traveled with friends to attend an out of town wedding. Opting to scrimp on lodging costs, the duo shared a crowded hotel room with four other friends. Slate just happened to be the only girl in the group, which led to her adopting a “teeny-tiny” voice to communicate her comparative petiteness to the other men in the room. The voice, a running joke for the rest of the weekend, became the eventual creative spark that would launch a web series, children’s books and feature-length film released by A24.   Soon thereafter, the first […]

The panels have been announced for the 2022 Gotham Week Conference, the first time the event will occur in person since 2019. The panelists include Jenny Slate and other team members behind Marcel the Shell With Shoes On, director of Bodies Bodies Bodies Halina Reijn and co-directors of The Janes Tia Lessin and Emma Pildes. Slate, who voiced the title character and co-wrote the script, will be joined by Marcel director Dean Fleischer Camp and animation director Kirsten Lepore. Other panelists at the 2022 Gotham Week Conference include Adamma and Adanne Ebo, the respective director and producer of Honk For Jesus. […]

There’s a saying that a movie is made three times: once when it’s written, once when it’s shot and once when it’s edited. To create the new A24 release Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, that maxim had to expand to accommodate an additional creative cycle. Marcel, the story of a chatty one-inch tall seashell searching for his family, was in essence shot twice. First, cinematographer Bianca Cline captured the live-action components, leaving a Marcel-sized space in the compositions. Months later, armed with copious notes to match lighting, lensing, focus, etc., stop motion director of photography Eric Adkins brought Marcel […]

When I interviewed Dean Fleischer-Camp and Jenny Slate about their short film, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, for Filmmaker‘s 2010 25 New Faces series, both remember the project resulting from a period where they were a little down. Then a couple, Fleischer-Camp described being “unfilled” at work, while Slate said, ‘I was depressed… a little bit. We were at a time in our lives when whatever we made would have a layer of gravity. And the real magic of [the movie] to me is that it has this layer of gravity, but it’s still about an adorable little shell.” […]