Oh I am so glad I waited to see Marcel The Shell With Shoes On in the cinema. What a gorgeous, adorable film. My heart melted for 90 minutes straight. I had never seen the original YouTube shorts, so I was coming into this fresh. This succeeds, personally, on pretty much every level. It’s beautifully shot, with the animation and live action blend working perfectly. It is genuinely very funny, with a range of humour from pushing and pulling the logic of Marcel’s universe (walking a piece of lint in lieu of owning a dog, I mean my god), to character beats. More importantly, though, it is earnestly wholesome in a way that never comes across as saccharine, always taking care to cut through the treacle, so to speak, with the melancholic text and subtext, of being left behind, of coping with being left, of how we react to a scary world around us. This is grown up filmmaking in a way that easily and happily transcends the usual “throw a gag in for the parents” mood. It probably won’t win Best Animated Film as the Oscars, but honestly? It shouldn’t need to. I will think about this much longer and hold it more dearly in my heart than most other films I imagine I’ll see this year.