Marcel The Shell Is Officially An Oscar-Nominated Movie Star

Directed by Dean Fleischer-Camp and co-written by Jenny Slate, the original Marcel the Shell with Shoes On was uploaded to YouTube in October 2010. Since then, it has been viewed more than 35.5 million times.

The original short alone is full of memorable Marcel the Shell quotes about hilarious small living like...

“Guess what I wear as a hat? A lentil!”

"Guess what I use as a pen? I use a pen but it takes the whole family."

Marcel says his one regret in life is that he’ll never have a dog... so sometimes he ties a hair to a piece of lint and drags it around.

His name is Alan.

The Marcel the Shell voice originated when Slate was sharing a hotel room with five other friends. She told CBS Sunday Morning that her sense of feeling small and cramped inspired her to start speaking in the trademark squeaky voice.

Inspired by the weird voice, Fleischer-Camp knew he wanted to make a short with Slate... but they needed a character. After playing around with some googly eyes, he eventually made Marcel one day while Slate was out. (Slate and Fleischer-Camp were married from 2012 to 2016.)

Marcel’s grandmother has been a character in the “Marcel Universe” since at least 2012, when Slate explained to Conan O’Brien that she was based on her own gravelly-voiced grandmother.

(Not too shabby for a one inch tall shell.)

Slate and Fleischer-Camp have expressed being fiercely protective of the little shell, eschewing big budget pitches they didn’t think honored the character they’d created. “We felt a responsibility to do it right,” Fleischer-Camp told EW, “and I think we did.”

Producer Elisabeth Holm explained to Romper that part of that timeline had to do with the fact that the movie was, essentially, made four times: audio, then story board, followed by filming backgrounds, then adding the stop-motion characters.

(And, I mean, if Marcel didn’t know he made it before, this is his sign...)

In the A24 press notes, Slate describes Marcel as “the best version of me.” Fleischer-Camp says Marcel embodies an idea of self-love that “Jenny and I didn’t possess back in 2010, so we made Marcel instead."