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Melissa Harris-Perry: We're back on The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry.

Jenny Slate: My name is Marcel. No, that's not the first time I've done that. My name is Marcel, and I'm partially a shell, as you can see on my body, but I also have shoes and a face. I like that about myself, and I like myself, and I have a lot of other great qualities as well.

Melissa Harris-Perry: In 2010, the stop motion animation video, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On went viral across YouTube.

Jenny Slate: I like myself and I have a lot of other great qualities as well.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Now, Marcel is a one-inch tall talking shell with a single googly eye, a mouth, and shoes. We learn in the short film that Marcel wears a lentil as a hat, sits in a bean bag chair made from a raisin, and goes skiing using skis made from toenails. It's almost impossible not to love this resourceful and very sweet-sounding shell, voice by comedian Jenny Slate, who you might also know from her recurring guest role on Parks and Recreation.

Jenny Slate: Oh, damn.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Or as the star of the 2014 comedy Obvious Child. This month, a feature-length film version of Marcel the Shell with Shoes On was released in theaters. In this mockumentary-style movie, co-writer and director, Dean Fleischer-Camp plays a fictional version of himself and follows Marcel on his journey to reunite with his family after the mysterious disappearance. I spoke with Jenny about the film and started with the origin story of our hero Marcel the Shell with Shoes On.

Jenny Slate: It actually occurred in pieces. First was the voice. Dean Fleischer-Camp, the director of the film and directed the shorts and also animated the shorts, he and I were at a wedding and we were sharing a hotel room with five other friends. We were all trying to save some money. I just felt really squished in there. I just started to say like, "It's like really squished. This is really annoying."

Saying being small. He had promised a friend that he would make a video for their show that they had in Williamsburg like a comedy show. He asked if he could interview that voice. He did and it came out like, oh, the character is small, and he's trying to deal with that. Dean took that information and he took a bunch of found objects and made Marcel's body. He's the person who created the way Marcel looks.

Then I saw Marcel. He asked me, "Well, who do you think you are? Now that you know what you look like, tell me more about yourself." For a reason that I really honestly can't explain, except for it's just what I did in my mind, I said, "My name is Marcel, and I'm partially a shell." Marcel does come from being pretty straightforward. That's the first encounter we have with him is he's just describing himself.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I really maybe need you to do a reality show just with you and your friends because I see the kind of friend group you are clearly hanging with where it goes from, "Oh, we're all trying to save some money," and packed in here, to that original video, now 32 million views on YouTube. Did it feel like work to take Marcel from those short little snippets of self-identification, and I'm small, and here's the problem, those initial short videos into a feature-length film, were you able to remain playful?

Jenny Slate: Yes. I think we were so lucky to be able to remain playful and everybody who joined us joined in but brought their own sense of style into that. Kirsten Lepore, our animation director, and you can tell the way that people's feelings are actually actively moving around inside this work. That's something I'm so proud of because I do think that when you watch it, it signals to you that you can put your own emotional scope into it as well. That it's actually an open channel.

When you have a creative instinct and you have an idea that you realize has the potential to really expand and help you grow as a person, as a thinking, feeling alive person, it feels more like, I would imagine, how very athletic people just need to run. I, again, don't really feel like that, or how they say like some dogs just really need a lot of space to run and it feels good to them and things can be strenuous without being a strain. That is how it felt to me is at times we're pushing it, especially just trying to keep the story close to the truth.

Even though it's the story of a one-eyed shell with two shoes and he doesn't really exist and he's not a real mammal or creature, there was work, but I don't think that it felt wrong when you're trying to put your foot into a tiny shoe or something like that.

Melissa Harris-Perry: At the center of the film is Marcel's separation from his family. Talk to me about how that became the core of this story.

Jenny Slate: This film took seven years to make. We came up with the story, really, at the start that this separation between Marcel and his family that they got ripped away from each other. We always knew that would be a part of it. People recently have said like, "Is this a reaction to the quarantine and that separation?" It isn't. I'm 40 now. I started making this movie when I was 32 or 33. That was a really jarring time for me because a lot of people think, I think that you get to, let's say 30, and your life should be in place.

It's really horrifying to realize that your 20s can be a second surprise adolescence, and you can feel separated from your idea of who you thought you would be. You can feel separated from the amount of support you realize you need in order to get to where you want to be. You can feel separated from a belief system that you maybe grew up with, and it doesn't work for you anymore. In my case, I think that time in my 30s, especially after working with Gillian Robespierre and Elisabeth Holm who made all these trials, I was like, "Oh, I have a lot of internalized misogyny. I got to split off."

Dean, in my relationship itself, was changing. We noticed that. Instead of wanting to turn away, we wanted to put it at the center and try to make it into a rich planting ground for something new that was alive. I also think most people in one way or another hope that intense separation doesn't occur for them, but for all of us, if we love anyone or anything, unfortunately, endings are a part of life. The life cycle doesn't include an ending. It's so scary, but it's also so scary because there's so much that is precious. We also wanted to focus on what is precious.

Melissa Harris-Perry: All right. We're going to pause for a moment, but we will shell you short. We'll be right back for more of our conversation with the comedian and voice of Marcel The Shell, Jenny Slate. Hey, y'all. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry back again on The Takeaway with Jenny Slate, comedian and co-creator of the new movie, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, based on the short YouTube film of the same name. I asked Jenny about the value of absurdist or escapist comedy in the turbulent times we're living in.

Jenny Slate: I know that the value for me, at least, is that the emotions are still all real, the joy, the surprise, the lovely feeling of goodness that one can feel in one's self when you deeply connect to something that's so different than what you are. I think right now, at least, to me and many other people as well, it feels like examples that we have of despair, of disrespect, and of oppression, they feel like classic illustrations of just people that don't care or people that are hurtful or things that are scary, even taking it away from human behaviors, but just looking at climate change. a hurricane's really, really scary, it looks scary, it is scary.

It's that when you have these really, really well-defined hardcore examples of things that can hurt, it can make you feel like the things that in your everyday that you think can help, just that they must have failed, that they must have not won some sort of a battle that you didn't even know you were supposed to be fighting just by being alive.

Taking in art, whatever it is, you go to the museum, you see the paintings, you go to the museum of natural history even, and just see animals, or you watch a movie like ours, and you're reminded that a living experience is filled with everything and it's filled with so many surprises of goodness and that they're here and they want to be accessed and you want to access them. We have to keep continuing to be alive and seeking out pleasure even though it can feel harder, even inappropriate.

I'm happy to offer this now because it's genuinely funny. We made it for people of all ages and I'm proud of it. Sometimes it's also really hard to feel proud these days if you feel like you can't really figure out how to make your point of view be in a useful discussion.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Especially if you're just a teeny tiny shell with shoes on. I think a lot of us can feel like that. You have the extraordinary privilege of a microphone, you have the extraordinary privilege of having a public voice, but for so many, I think it can feel as though you're a tiny shell with shoes on trying to make yourself heard.

Jenny Slate: Yes, or it can't. I think being a shell with shoes on not being heard in Marcel's environment actually seems a lot more chill than what we have.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Oh, that's true.

Jenny Slate: Which is feeling really, really small and then going on to social media and being like, "I hate this," or like, "That person's bad." It's like, yes, for the most part, I agree with a lot. I do dislike a lot of things and I do feel like, oh, no, I really, really don't like the decisions that are being made here and there. That arena feels like not what we want it to be. Why isn't it working? Why isn't it changing? I think that sometimes can make me feel less powerful.

Actually, sometimes I think what we forget and that what I at least need to remember is it's also important to be a tiny shell with two shoes in one eye. You know what I mean? To just be in your house and be like, "Oh, there's the refrigerator. I was nice to myself and I got the good yogurt that's not healthy yogurt, it's like a pudding."

Melissa Harris-Perry: Whenever I raid my refrigerator at night, I am definitely going to speak to myself in my Marcel voice in my head about why this is a really good self-care moment. I do want to ask you about your 2014 film, Obvious Child. It's comedy. Very funny, just so that folks know, and at the same time also very honestly depicts your character's abortion.

Jenny Slate: What? You're saying that a guy doesn't want a drunk pregnant girl in a box.

Female Speaker: If you're a serial killer.

Male Speaker: Maybe you want to tell him.

Female Speaker: No. Why? You don't owe him anything. You don't even know this guy.

Jenny Slate: Maybe he just deserves to know that this happened, and that I'm not a psycho, and I'm going to get an abortion.

Melissa Harris-Perry: In this post-Roe v. Wade, Dobbs decision world, I'm just wondering as you look back on your own work and you think about Obvious Child, how you see that potentially fitting into this conversation that so many are having publicly at this moment.

Jenny Slate: Well, I think at the time, we just wanted to show an abortion that was legal, that was safe, that took place at Planned Parenthood, and that was an experience that happened to a person who was growing and changing and allowed to do that before and after the procedure, and that there's a way for this to be a healthcare experience that is important but not necessarily character-defining. For the character in that film, Donna, the most important thing for her was that she learned how to figure out how she wanted to create her standup, how she wanted to do her creative work.

I think that so many people can relate to that and that she could use the truth of her life in that work and that having an abortion, while it is a serious decision that every person who has a body capable of becoming pregnant should be able to make for themselves, yes, it's part of it, but she doesn't have to make it be more or less important than what it was to her and that it's specific to everyone.

What is shocking now and what is really sad is that that experience that Donna was able to have also as a person who didn't make a lot of money is one that now has become aspirational. A safe legal abortion should not be something that we have to hope for. It should be a basic human right because it is. I'm glad that that movie is there now, especially the younger people who are growing up thinking that this might never have been normal.

While we've always been fighting for reproductive justice and it was never good enough, it's certainly not now, but we can get there. The people who care about reproductive justice won't stop fighting for it, and I'm one of them.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Jenny Slate, star and co-writer of Marcel the Shell with Shoes On. Jenny, thank you so much.

Jenny Slate: Thank you so much for having me. I'm, again, so honored to be on this show.

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