![]() There’s some sincere love & heartbreak to be found in this stop-motion fantasy adventure, as long as you can get over your initial, cynical reaction to its overdose of tiny-things cuteness. With the Marcel the Shell movie, Slate & Fleisher-Camp are a real-life divorced couple collaborating on a heartfelt story about loss of community and the difficulties of friendship by revisiting a long-dead project they created when there were still together. Whenever cynics decry twee art for being overly cutesy on its fussy, manicured surface, I always feel like they’re deliberately overlooking how much deeply felt hurt & sadness is lurking just beyond that aesthetic armor. That relentless setup/punchline rhythm carries over to the movie brilliantly, but Slate & director Dean Fleisher-Camp triple down on the twee whimsy of the shorts by expanding them into a feature film about loneliness, community, and loss. I remember the original series of Marcel the Shell shorts functioning as a rapidfire joke delivery system where every punchline is “So small!”, as Marcel shows off what he uses as a hat (a lentil), a hang glider (a Dorito), and skis (toenails from a man), etc. Voiced by Jenny Slate in the creakiest, Joanna Newsomiest voice she can manage, Marcel’s entire existence is a celebration of how cute things are in miniature. ![]() The titular Marcel is a thimble-sized seashell with a googly eye (speaking of Everything Everywhere) and a titular pair of sneakers. None of these recent stop-motion novelties could claim to be quite as twee as the Marcel the Shell with Shoes On movie, though, which is so aggressively cutesy it’s outright daring cynics to call it cloying & twee. The dreamworld stop-motion effects of Strawberry Mansion account for a lot of that film’s Gondry-throwback appeal the film-nerd celebration of Phil Tippett’s Mad God hints at a culture-wide appreciation for handcrafted art and the heavily textured surfaces of the horror anthology The House feel like they were lifted directly from a Wes Anderson moodboard. One of the signs that twee aesthetics are back in vogue is the wealth of recent stop-motion animation. Both Strawberry Mansion & Everything Everywhere recall vintage twee cinema, but neither could not be mistaken for being made in the aughts. I’m also encouraged to see directors like the Daniels, Kentucker Audley, and Albert Birney pushing twee aesthetics to new, modern extremes. I’m getting to the age now when my generation is old enough to make mass-distributed art, and there’s apparently still a lot of affection for twee whimsy out there, despite early critical rejection of the (loosely defined) genre’s cutesy sentimentality. I imagine Strawberry Mansion would also be a hit with that crowd, if it had a big enough marketing push for them to know it exists. I’m even more heartened to see a new generation of college-age weirdos embrace the small crafts & big emotions of Everything Everywhere the same way I did when twee was the go-to alt aesthetic. So, I’ve been heartened to see Gondry’s influence creep up in recent films like Sorry to Bother You, Girl Asleep, and Dave Made a Maze. That label was slapped on so much art I loved in my formative years that it registered as the name of a movement rather than a critical insult. I didn’t even know the term “twee” was a pejorative. ![]() at least in my mildewed apartment where Belle & Sebastian blared while half-formed semi-adults got stoned and doodled in coloring books. It was an era when film festival titans like Gondry, Spike Jonze, and Wes Anderson ruled the land. In their wake, I even revisited Gondry’s divisive dreamscape drama The Science of Sleep to confront what an emotionally inept dipshit I was at the time. There’s a proto-Etsy craftiness to the visual effects & heart-on-sleeve sentimentality of both Strawberry Mansion & Everything Everywhere All at Once that sent me time-traveling back to the twee era. Earlier this year, there were a couple low-budget, high-ambition throwbacks to the handcrafted twee fantasies Michel Gondry was making when I was in high school & college in the aughts.
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