‘Marcel The Shell With Shoes On’: Exclusive Track From Disasterpeace’s Score

EXCLUSIVE: Deadline has an exclusive track from Disasterpeace’s score for the anticipated stop-motion comedy Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, which is set for digital release via Lakeshore Records tomorrow, as A24 releases the pic in North America. (A vinyl edition of the soundtrack is also forthcoming.)

The film centers on Marcel (Jenny Slate), an adorable one-inch-tall shell who ekes out a colorful existence with his grandmother Connie (Isabella Rossellini) and their pet lint, Alan. It’s based on Dean Fleischer-Camp and Slate’s viral stop-motion shorts of the same name, which have garnered more than 50 million YouTube views since their 2010 debut, also spurring the creation of two New York Times bestselling children’s books.

With his vivid yet measured score for the Marcel film, Disasterpeace looked to reflect the distinctively matter-of-fact yet wholly endearing qualities of the character that has gained millions of fans since its introduction. “The ‘Marcel’ score tries to be organic without using organic sources,” says the composer. “The music is heavily influenced by the Japanese ambient music of the early 80s and took many iterations of stripping things away to find the right amount of emotional ambiguity. But even after the subduing process, there’s still a pretty fun romp in there.”

Disasterpeace is an A24 alum who found his breakout big-screen project in David Robert Mitchell’s modern horror classic It Follows, released in the U.S. in 2015. He subsequently went on to collaborate with the director on his 2018 neo-noir Under the Silver Lake starring Andrew Garfield, also scoring J.C. Chandor’s starry action pic Triple Frontier for Netflix and Halina Reijn’s darkly comedic A24 horror Bodies Bodies Bodies, which is slated for release on August 5th.

Also starring Isabella Rossellini, Rosa Salazar, Thomas Mann and Lesley Stahl, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On made its world premiere at Telluride last fall. Camp directed from the script he wrote with Slate and Nick Paley, which was based on a story he penned with Slate, Paley and Elisabeth Holm. Camp, Slate and Holm produced alongside Andrew Goldman, Caroline Kaplan, Paul Mezey and Terry Leonard, with Philipp Engelhorn, William Byerley, Nion McEvoy, George Rush and Michael Raisler exec producing.

Listen to Disasterpeace’s Marcel track, titled “Be Odorant,” above.