‘Marcel the Shell’s’ New Adventure: Heading to the Academy Award’s race

Marcel the Shell is having a new adventure: It was announced by the Motion Picture Academy’s short films and animation branch that the feature is eligible for consideration in the animated feature section of the Academy Awards. The charismatic character jumped from YouTube to cinemas and now is coming for the red carpet!

Marcel the Shell With Shoes On is an A24 film that premiered during June in the US. The feature is directed by Dean Fleischer-Camp who also stars in the film. Marcel mixes live action and stop-motion animation having Fleischer-Camp playing an amateur documentary filmmaker who meets Marcel the Shell and his grandma Connie and helps them find their missing family.

While Fleischer-Camp performs as himself, Marcel and nana Connie are animated characters: they are, as Marcel says in the film -“Partially a Shell”-. Shells, as fictional characters in the film, are living beings that live in communities, they are tiny and unnoticed by most people. Marcel’s voice is performed by actress Jenny Slate and nana Connie’s voiced by Italian actress Isabella Rossellini. The film includes Lesley Stahl as herself in a major event of the story.

There are rules for eligibility for the animation category: The films need to include a significant number of major characters animated and those characters have to be created using a frame-by-frame technique. Also, at least 75 percent of the film has to include animation.

There are two other films that were announced to be eligible for the category: the Canadian animated documentary Eternal Spring and Richard Linklater’s Apollo 10 ½ released by Netflix.Eternal Spring will represent Canada in the best international feature category and is directed by Jason Loftus. The film is also hybrid, mixing live-action and animation.