Marcel The Shell Returns In Awesome New Video

By Elana Goodwin on October 22, 2014

After a three-year hiatus, the world’s favorite talking shell returned with a brand-new hilarious video on October 20.

It’s true — “Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, Three” has finally arrived and it’s everything we could ever have hoped for.

Comedian and actress Jenny Slate, who is the voice of Marcel, and her director-husband Dean Fleischer-Camp released the third stop motion animated video featuring the most adorable anthropomorphic shell with shoes on and it’s already amassed over 1 million views.

Photo Credit: vimeo.com 

For those of you who haven’t heard of Marcel the Shell, he’s a shy, nasally-sounding, sneaker-wearing shell who talks to an off-screen documentary filmmaker about his life.

Marcel tosses out gems like “Guess what I wear as a hat? A lentil” and “Guess what I want but I’m not gonna beg for it? A nickname.” Other winners include: “My one regret in life is that I’ll never have a dog. But sometimes I tie a hair to a piece of lint and I drag it around” and “Guess why I smile a lot? Because it’s worth it.”

In the newest video, Marcel gets locked out of his house and has allergies while waiting among the various plants outside and talking to the filmmaker.

While outside, he tells viewers the truth about shrimps, (“they’re the idiots of the sea”), how he unwinds, and the story behind a grape. When he gets back inside he sings a song called “A Perfect Day” about when friends have to part that he learned “at camp” and he sings because his best friend lives far away.

The first video was released in August 2010 when it premiered at the 2010 American Film Institute’s Festival where it won Best Animated Short and was also chosen to be part of the 2011 Sundance Film Festival. Unexpectedly, the video went viral and became a huge sensation.

The second Marcel video, “Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, Two” was released in November 2011 and racked up around 8.1 million views.

And that was the last fans saw of him until this third video, called “The Most Surprised I’ve Ever Been,” which was released October 20.

Photo Credit: mtv.com

The third short film coincides with the release of the book “Marcel the Shell: The Most Surprised I’ve Ever Been” written by Slate and Fleischer-Camp which is due out this week and is the second Marcel book they’ve written.

The first book, which came out in 2011, was called “Marcel the Shell: Things About Me.”

But how did the little one-eyed shoe-wearing shell come to be? The story starts with Slate joining “Saturday Night Live” in 2009. During the live taping of her first episode on the show, she accidentally dropped an “F-bomb” during her debut sketch “Biker Chick Chat.”

While the slip-up didn’t result in her immediate firing, at the end of the 2009-2010 season, her contract was not renewed, ending her time on the long-running show.

On the “Late Show with David Letterman” on October 17, Slate told the story behind Marcel the Shell and how she came up with him. The funny actress reflected on the time in 2009, when she was pretty sure she was going to be fired from “SNL” and wanted to do something creative to prove she could still do something.

While staying in a small motel room for a wedding along with her now-husband Fleisher-Camp, and a few of their friends, Slate started feeling very squished and just started talking in the Marcel voice, she revealed.

According to Slate, Fleischer-Camp had said he would make a video for a friend’s art show and so the two made the first Marcel video, really just for themselves, but decided to put it on the internet.

That same video (the first Marcel in a Shell short film) now has over 23.6 million views on YouTube. Also on Letterman, Slate sang an amazing sad song as Marcel called “My Mother Got Lost in the Rug.”

If you have not yet seen the new awesome third video featuring Marcel the Shell, check it out below:

And for those of you who haven’t seen the first two videos featuring the slightly forlorn and all-around hilarious Marcel, I urge you to check them out.

Why? “Because it’s worth it.”

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