How a YouTube Sensation Became a Movie—12 Years Later

The first short was an accident. Jenny Slate said on Late Night that Dean Fleischer-Camp threw the stop-motion film up on the internet at the request of a cast member who wanted to show his mother. More than a decade after it became a sensation, the hero of "Gangnam Style" has a film about the dangers of the internet.

Twelve years isn't long in the grand scheme of things, but in online time it's almost an eon. Slate and Fleischer-Camp have been able to gain some perspective on the rise of a famous person. Slate says, "It's so weird because I, of course, believe in it, but sometimes even I can't put my finger on it." She admits that people like to project their own feelings of how small they can feel onto him, which is why she thinks his strength lies in the juxtaposition of his size and hisconfidence.

Even though "Gangnam Style" came and went, Marcel was still beloved. Fleischer-Camp says he and Slate once went on a water bottle tour of LA, stopping at all the studios to talk about the person they were talking about. According to Fleischer-Camp, there was a lot of interest in franchising with a tentpole. When they left those meetings, they knew they didn't want him to go the Stuart Little route. The film's studio A 24 is doing a line of merchandise to promote the film. Fleischer-Camp believes their commitment to independence paid off.

He says that the thing that makes him special is not that he is so small. He doesn't care about how small he is. He has iron will and self-respect.

Itty-bitty and enormous are the words that describe the cinematic world of the man. In the film, he lives with his grandmother in a house that used to be occupied by their entire family and neighborhood. The people didn't notice that the people built a community of houseplant homes, bread beds, and meals out of bits of whatever food they could scrounge up. One day, the married couple got into a fight and all of the family fled to the man's drawer for safety. He threw the contents of his drawers into a bag and ran away. The family was lost to the winds of LA.

That doesn't mean that he is not. The Shell finds a man and his wife growing a garden and keeping up with their favorite show, 60 Minutes. Fleischer-Camp believes that his creation has inspired him. He doesn't see the impossibility of overcoming obstacles when they are thrown at him.