Before we all watched people hack IKEA furniture and DIY twist taper candles on TikTok, we got the majority of our non-TV entertainment from YouTube videos. And if you go back to the year 2010, you might remember coming across clips of an adorable little talking shell named Marcel. The viral shortscreated by Dean Fleischer-Camp and voiced by Jenny Slate, charmed millions of us back then, and now Marcel is back to bring some joy to 2022 in a bigger way: the stars of the shell animated in stop-motion in his own film, Marcel the shod shell. The story follows his search for his long-lost family, and he is aided by a documentary filmmaker who discovers Marcel and his grandmother, Connie, and their pet, Alan, living in his Airbnb. Making a home for people on the big screen is one thing, making a home for a 1-inch-tall shell is another.
Luckily, set designer Liz Toonkel has a habit of shrinking fictional spaces (she has a background in theater design). In Marcel’s world – a real house in Los Angeles that the creators rented for two months to gather the shots they would need to combine with those of the stop-motion stage – a tennis ball works like a car makeshift VHS tapes double as a couch, indoor plants serve as actual homes for her seashell community, and two slices of bread make a bed. By the nature of her job, Toonkel already had a collection of odd little objects she could pull from, study up close, and reuse in new ways for Marcel. “We didn’t just bring something because it was cute; it had to have a function,” she explains.
The designer and her fellow designers imagined that the house had belonged to the owner’s grandmother and had been passed down from generation to generation. So she sought to bring in older furniture to communicate this recurring theme of family lineage. In other words, it’s not just stuff from HomeGoods. “There are things that were kind of pushed to the periphery and then either taken by the shells or have to be listened to and noticed,” she says. “There is a vague neutrality like there would be in an Airbnb.” A rental owner herself, Toonkel knew the nuances and even took the list of rules from her own fridge and temporarily displayed them on the shelf.
While the film offers important lessons in the power of positivity, the design reaffirms the value of upcycling. “A man’s junk is a shell’s treasure,” Toonkel shares with a laugh. Nana Connie’s bedroom is an abandoned jewelry box, and although all valuables have apparently been removed, it is a space she has been able to make her own. “There’s something really special about them finding these things that are out of style and giving them new life,” adds Toonkel. It’s something the designer has tried to replicate in her own life by buying second-hand furniture and second-hand decor. “You don’t have to spend a lot of money to have style,” she says. And Marcel… well, he’s full of them.
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