Namely, a thing he calls “kind of inherently broken and skee-jawed” about stop-motion animation.
“In retrospect, I’m so glad that we went through that process because of little things.
Stop-motion is a real tactile process.
‘Marcel the Shell with Shoes On’.A24
It’s just achingly fallible in the way that humans are.
It’s vulnerable, it’s messed up, it’s broken.”
Here, Lepore breaks down the specific challenges involved in bringing Marcel to the big screen.
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Practical world-building
A good chunk ofMarcel the Shell With Shoes Ontakes place at his one-inch-tall level.
“We didn’t want to use miniatures,” Lepore explains.
Putting on a Marcel thinking hat, what would he use to do this?'"
Marcel next to Dean Fleischer-Camp in ‘Marcel the Shell With Shoes On’.A24
The puppet department also created new characters, Lepore recalls.
“That’s where all the little cereal guys got created,” she says.
“The little pretzel guys and the cereal guys all came from the puppet team.”
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As for what didn’t make the cut?
“I think there was an empty ChapStick guy.
Something with a Band-Aid.
And I designed this little electrical cap guy.”
“But it’s really tricky in stop-motion, because then you’re moving around the puppet.
As soon as you do that, it looks too flat.
It just gives away the gag.”
Luckily, Lepore was able to be on set to monitor the capturing of the live-action material.
It’s a nerdy camera thing, but that was probably one of our biggest hurdles."
“We went back and forth a lot on: Do we go a little bit bigger?”
“It’s likeGuinness Book of World Recordstuff to animate a puppet that is an inch tall.
There were so many challenges inherent in that.”
The animators used tools that were the size of a fingernail.
“We’re like, ‘Try not to lose them!’
but how do you not drop a fingernail eventually?”
“That’s the scale we were working with so teeny tiny.
“You don’t really have much else to work with,” the animator explains.
“You’ve got shoes.
You’ve got an eyeball.
That’s all you have.
It was such an amazing discovery.
I feel like it just really helped us nail the acting.”
“They’re totally along for the emotional ride,” she says.
“The technical stuff doesn’t take them out of it.
That was really our main goal throughout the whole process.”
