Marcel the Shell with Shoes On contains a meta level of loss. But beyond this, there's a grief that plays with the miracle of this movie's creation. His grandmother is growing frail and Marcel's tiny voice trembles as he tries to shield them both from the inevitable. There's the loss of Marcel's family, but other avenues of grief surface. Yet amid these bursts of playful fun, there are tender tangles of loss. Along the way, many adorable shenanigans occur, involving pesky dogs, a rolling tennis ball, his beloved grandma Connie (voiced by Isabella Rossellini), and 60 Minutes' television journalist Lesley Stahl. Fascinated but also driven to help, the documentarian uploads videos of Marcel online, hoping internet attention will yield search results. In the movie, these exchanges blossom into a quest to search for Marcel's long-lost family, who'd been scattered to the winds through a cruel twist of fate. Like the YouTube shorts, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On centers on conversations between the titular mollusk and a curious documentarian. All these years later though, Marcel is back with a feature film and a mindful, willfully silly exploration of loss that had even this hard-shelled critic cracking up and breaking down. But frankly, I never got the appeal of the little critter, who mumbled about being small and the big world he didn't understand. Sure, I remember the hoopla that arose in 2010 (yes, 12 years ago), when Marcel the Shell with Shoes On became a YouTube sensation and a twee meme. Are you ready for a shell with a googly eye to make you cry? I wasn't.

Super mom meme