Marcel is a small one-eyed shell living with an Airbnb house tenant. Marcel lost his relatives, only his grandmother by his side and a dog named Arthur. “There must be so many others like me,” – Marcel thinks, then tries to find his family. The tenant uses social media; however, it turns out unexpectedly. This story touches the hearts of its viewers, and it didn’t pass my heart by either. Let’s go deep inside the story and find essential life lessons hidden. 

Attention – spoilers ahead!

“Let’s forget about being afraid; just take an adventure.” – this sounds like a motto that I wished I heard a long time ago when I was wondering if my life would change if I acted on some of my important decisions. But, as a girl in her teens, I didn’t have much courage. However, courage is a rare thing even among grown-ups, right? Courage is something emotional, and if you have no idea about what you would change, you will not feel that. For example, if you like someone, then you start to think about how to confess – this is where courage appears, right? And then, after we got the courage, we begin to think:

• What if everything changes?

And the movie gives us a simple answer:

• It will.

We should not be scared of any change happening in our life; changes build our lives, changes build our history, and changes build our future. When Marcel started his trip around the city to find his family, he saw the rest of the world beyond the house walls and corners of a garden. 

We are slowly moving on to the importance of the community. A community is a group of people united by having a common goal or point of view on things. Nowadays, we all live under the influence of social media. We spend so much time in front of our phones’ screens that we become blind to things beyond this electronic world. This problem is raised in this film as well: when Marcel started to record himself to post his video on YouTube about whom he was searching for, he thought it would make a big deal, and it would be much faster to ask people from all around the world for help.

However, what happened is that people started to watch Marcel’s videos not because they wanted to help but because they liked just watching him. Marcel was becoming popular, but that didn’t help him to find his relatives. So, the question is whether social media unites people from all around the world or, instead, makes us feel lonelier.

“I truly enjoy the sound of myself connected to everything,” – Marcel said when he finally united with other shells like him, and not just like him: there were different creatures as well which looked like nutshells, crackers, peanuts, and others, but what unites them is a feeling of belonging. Living in a specific society to which you don’t feel any attachment is so hard. We have a good saying that a true family consists of personalities who make you feel comfortable co-existing. 

The most challenging moment is losing an important person in your life, as in the movie. After Marcel’s grandmothers death the garden she cared for turned gray. No more sunshine, just raindrops falling on the ground where the grandmother was growing beets and other plants; the whole garden life has become miserable without his grandmother. Should we be sad about her death? Definitely not. Even though Marcel felt bad, life brought him another present – he found his other relatives, which filled the emptiness in his soul. They all became his new family, even bigger than before.

Here we see that no matter what happens, whoever leaves you or whoever you lose, something bigger is waiting behind your back. Sometimes we should just let something or someone go, free a place in our life for the fresh air. I am not saying that the death of a person is good. Circumstances are changing, people are changing, and you are changing too – this is what we call life. We people are too fragile to realize that not everything is permanent, and this is totally fine. You can cry when you feel sad, scream when you are scared, just be yourself and let your genuine emotions go out of your soul. 

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“Let’s forget about being afraid. It may be good; it may be not.” – the following fall semester of studies is coming to NEIU. Let’s do our best and enjoy each second of us being students. Express yourself, be loyal to yourself and your dreams, and have fun – life is the biggest present we all were given.