Actor Jenny Slate Describes What's Behind Her 'Marcel the Shell' Voice
Actor Jenny Slate offered her take on the high-pitched voice of Marcel, the title character in the critically acclaimed stop-motion animated film “Marcel the Shell With Shoes On.”
The former “Saturday Night Live” cast member talked with Deadline about her voice role in the Golden Globe-nominated A24 film, an adaptation of a series of shorts that she co-wrote with director Dean Fleischer-Camp.
Slate compared the voice of Marcel, a 1-inch-tall talking shell who lives with his grandmother Connie, to “somebody making an abstract painting to try to describe a set of feelings that they have.”
“There are these moments in your daily life when you feel small and you feel needed, that you need to be heard,” Slate said.
“You feel insistent, and also gregarious and likable and ready to party. You put that all together and it comes out in this weird tight stream. And that’s what that voice is.”
She added that the character is her, if she were considerate of and connected to others except a “little bit less freaked out by what they think of me.”
“And Marcel’s pretty relaxed into his own state of being,” Slate said.
The film arrived over a decade after the original “Marcel the Shell With Shoes On” short premiered in 2010. The short, which has two sequels, has since garnered over 33 million views on YouTube.
The film, which currently has a 99% score among critics on film review site Rotten Tomatoes, has qualified for consideration in the animated feature category at this year’s Academy Awards.
