From Marcel the Shell with Shoes On to Weimar Season: What to see at Cambridge Arts Picturehouse in February 2023

Sponsored feature | Mark Walsh takes a look at upcoming releases and special screenings.

Marcel the Shell with Shoes On

It’s unusual to see a film being lauded in the animation categories at awards season when it appears to be live action, but that’s not the only thing that’s unusual – or charming – about Marcel. It was originally created as a series of shorts by Dean Fleischer Camp, each accompanied by a tie-in storybook, Marcel is a seashell with just a pair of shoes and one googly eye. Clearly those are back in favour after last year’s Everything, Everywhere, All At Once, a film which featured Jenny Slate; the actress provides the voice of Marcel as well as having co-created the character. While Camp and Slate were married for four years from 2012, they’ve come together again to adapt the character’s story to feature length.

While it has a real world setting, enough of Marcel’s adventures are animated to enable it to qualify for animation awards. In this feature-length version, Camp plays a documentary maker who moves into an Airbnb when his marriage ends, where he discovers a one inch tall talking shell who’s accompanied by his grandmother (also a shell, voiced by Isabella Rossellini). When Dean films Marcel’s daily activities he becomes an internet sensation, but he laments the fact that there used to be a whole community of shells, and with Dean’s help he sets out to find them. But Marcel is unaware of just how big the outside world really is…

The film is a combination of live action and animation (think Who Framed Roger Rabbit but with tiny talking shells rather than animated rabbits), and has secured itself nominations for best animation at both the BAFTAs and Oscars this year. It’s a heart-warming look at life and family that avoids being saccharine and might make Marcel as much of a star in the real world as he is in the film’s fictional universe.

Marcel The Shell With Shoes On opens on Friday, February 17.

Flee

The latest entry in the Watersprite Festival’s Pop Up events series at the Picturehouse ahead of this year’s festival is another unconventional animation, this time telling the real life story of a man who fled from Afghanistan as a child before settling in Denmark. Amin, an alias for the refugee, Is planning to marry his boyfriend Kaspar, but before he can do so he feels the need to share the full story of how he and his family escaped Kabul before becoming illegal immigrants in Russia.

The film is composed of animated sequences telling the story of Amin and his family’s struggles, interspersed with the interviews Amin’s giving in the safety of Denmark, occasionally interspersed with real life sequences reflecting the harsh nature of the life they were looking to escape. Using animation in a documentary form such as this is not unique, but as with predecessors such as Waltz With Bashir, the medium allows the drama of the situation to be explored in a way that might be too uncomfortable in life action, while in this case also protecting Amir’s anonymity. Amin, Kaspar and documentary maker Jonas Poher Rasmussen all voice themselves, and actors Riz Ahmed (Sound Of Metal) and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Game Of Thrones) act as executive producers.

Flee is screening on Monday, February 20.

Broker

Hizokaru Koreeda has a gift for telling stories of alternative families, from the children raising themselves in Nobody Knows to the three sisters and their half-sister in Our Little Sister and the unconventional family of Shoplifters. When researching the Japanese adoption system for 2013’s Like Father, Like Son, Koreeda learned the story of Japan’s only baby box, where unwanted children can be left for adoption in an attempt to avoid the social stigma of parental abandonment.

He’s located his film in South Korea where such boxes are slightly more commonplace in real life, but crafted a fictitious tale involving a couple selling box babies to the black market, a woman who catches them in the act when regretting leaving her own child and two detectives following the group on a road trip as the unusual temporary family searches for potential new parents, complete with a stowaway child. Japanese director Koreeda (who also writes and edits) uses Korean talent both in front of the camera, including Parasite’s Song Kang-ho, and behind it, from cinematographer Hong Kyung-pyo (Snowpiercer, Burning) to composer Jung Jae-il (Squid Game).

Broker opens on Friday, February 24.

Weimar Season (reDiscover)

The reDiscover season is currently exploring some of the prolific output of German cinema in the 1920s and 30s, with the cinema of the Weimar Republic responsible for some of the greatest masterpieces in cinema history. Some of them will be familiar even to audiences almost a century later, with two masterworks from director Fritz Lang: M (from February 17) starring Peter Lorre as a serial killer hunted through the underworld by cops and criminals, and his earlier Metropolis (from February 24), a futuristic science-fiction silent epic. Both are masterpieces of German Expressionist cinema and deserve to be seen on the big screen.

The season concludes on the 5th March with a film perhaps less familiar, but no less deserving of a notable place in the history of the cinema of the era. Mädchen in Uniform (Girls In Uniform) was a landmark film for a variety of reasons, one of the first films ever to deal directly with homosexuality but also directed by a woman with an all-female cast. But it was its negative view of discipline and authority that saw it banned by Joseph Goebbels, not seen in its native land for over a decade.

Manuela (Hertha Thiele) is raised by her father after her mother dies, before he enrols her in an all-girl boarding school. While she feels uncomfortable in the school’s strict environment, she forms an attachment to her teacher Fräulein von Bernburg (Dorothea Wieck), and falls in love with her after the teacher gives her a goodnight kiss. Leontine Sagan’s film deals with the struggles of Manuela to adapt to her new circumstances and to deal with her feelings, resulting in a dramatic climax. It’s a chance to watch a film which changed the rules of cinema, and inspired much of the LGBTQ+ film making that followed in its footsteps.