In Search of Lost Time Inspired Dog Names

If you are a fan of Animal Crossing, you must have come across a weird looking doggo named Marcel. He is a lazy villager in the game that first appears in City Folk. He is so stereotypically French that it hurts sometimes but evokes laughter from the people playing Animal Crossing. But what makes him so French? Well, first off, there is his name, Marcel, which is a pretty common name in France, but also his catchphrase, or, rather a word that he always says – non, which means no in the French language. He always uses non at the end of his sentences, best described in his famous quote “This shovel is used for digging up fossils, non?” Quite a funny way to make someone so stereotypically French and the game creator Katsuya Eguchi managed to do just that.

Marcel looks a little bit weird for a dog. He has green fur, which sometimes looks black, depending on the angle, and his face is painted white to resemble a mime, another stereotypically French thing. His eyes are round with dark pupils, and he has thick but short eyebrows, and his clown makeup at all times. His nose is painted orange, and he has red painted on whiskers. He wears the Chichi print shirt and has white paws, and sometimes resembles a robot cat Doraemon, which is a popular manga character for kids.

He is quite the explorer and always carries a shovel around with him. When you’re playing the game, Marcel will sometimes ask you to find him some fossils, probably because he is too lazy to dig them up himself. He is quite friendly and easygoing and gets along with most of the villagers. He lives in an Asian style home, has two samurai suits hanging off the walls, Lucky Cats, and a stereo, and he likes his coffee sweet, his favorite drink being mocha with two spoonfuls of sugar.

Sweet Marcel shares his name with one of the most influential French novelists, Marcel Proust, who wrote In Search of Lost Time. He began writing the monumental novel in 1909 and managed to create a novel in seven volumes, 3200 pages, and over 2000 characters! How he held it all in his head, we will never know, but it brought him the title of the greatest novelist of the 20^th century, and his novel the “greatest fiction to date.”