The story of Yellow Submarine may be paper-thin, but it’s funny. It’s perfectly surreal – but then, all cartoons are, with their fake danger, and squash-and-stretch exaggeration. But kids, too, are drawn to its kaleidoscopic nature, and easily follow the dreamy, free-associative approach to storytelling. Still, Yellow Submarine never gets too dark: yes, there’s a drug-haze logic to it, and the graphics that bloom and billow are hallucinogenic. The animation eats itself, and there’s something deliciously meta about the filmmakers’ approach they play with the cartoon form. I love the moment where a monstrous sucking beast hoovers up first other creatures, then the background, then his own body. Yellow Submarine realises the full potential of all that. And there are also suitably mind-blowing op-art style sequences – the seemingly infinite black-and-white sea of holes still freaks me out.Īnimation, in general, does possess an almost unique power to be, well, strange: you can create anything you can imagine, play wildly with scale and colour, even collapse space and time. While most of Yellow Submarine is in teeth-achingly bright hues, there’s also a rather sooty mixed media montage early on, to the mournful strains of Eleanor Rigby, that offers a haunting evocation of a Liverpool that’s far from the Swinging 60s of Carnaby Street. And it certainly isn’t Disney – the only other feature-length animation studio that was really a success at the time. Seas of monsters seem drawn straight from the animator’s subconscious. Watercolour shading on landscapes and plants lends an unsettling beauty. Flat outlined figures look like Aubrey Beardsley drawings on acid. Flowers and foliage curl and multiply in eye-popping hues. The animation, led by Heinz Edelmann, is in the vein of psychedelic artists Martin Sharp and Alan Aldridge, or graphic design outfits of the era such as The Fool and Hapshash and the Coloured Coat. It’s about the most 60s thing imaginable. There, dressing up as – yes – Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, they unfreeze the people and melt even the Blue Meanies’ cold hearts by singing All You Need is Love. One Pepperland inhabitant, named Old Fred, manages to flee in a yellow submarine, and winds up in Liverpool, where he enlists The Beatles to help they voyage through various surreal, metaphysical ‘seas’ (the sea of time, the sea of holes) until they make it to Pepperland. But it is invaded by the Blue Meanies, who can’t bear music, or beauty, or happiness and turn its inhabitants to stone. I also had a DVD of it as a student, and – having just watched the new, beautifully restored version in the cinema, with a resplendently loud, crisp soundtrack – can confirm that, at 50, it’s aging remarkably well.įor the uninitiated, the movie tells the story – such as it is – of Pepperland, a peaceful place full of gardens and bandstands, 80,000 leagues beneath the sea. ![]() But it still has an irresistible late ’60s spirit all of its own.I should know: I was raised on it, courtesy of hippie parents and a beloved grainy VHS I must have watched hundreds of times. In Beatles terms it feels like a ‘Sgt Pepper’ side project with a load of other off-cuts and outside influences merrily chucked into the pot. They’re voiced, a bit oddly, by actors and only appear briefly in a larking-about epilogue. It has flashes of winning silly humour (‘What day is it?’ ‘Sitar-day’), and who can resist the submarine turning into a cigarette lighter to the tune of the Hamlet cigar commercial? The Beatles themselves didn’t give a great deal to the film. But when already-existing songs like ‘Eleanor Rigby’, ‘Nowhere Man’, ‘All You Need Is Love’ and ‘Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds’ kick in, the whole thing soars and makes a strange sort of psychedelic sense. The fantastical story is happily all over the place, and the handful of songs written especially for the film aren’t especially memorable. ![]() ![]() Only The Beatles can help, and so an old sailor pitches up to Liverpool in a Yellow Submarine to collect them and take them on a mission to defeat the Meanies. Clearly influenced by Lewis Carroll’s Alice stories, ‘Yellow Submarine’ features a version of the band on the run through a series of hallucinogenic set-pieces involving bad folk called the Blue Meanies who are running riot in the seriously out-there Pepperland. But it’s weirder and scrappier than that, pitched somewhere dreamlike between childhood and adulthood. Now that the title track has become a nursery-school standard, you half expect this to be a kids’ cartoon. The Beatles put their name to no fewer than five films in their quick decade together, and while ‘Yellow Submarine’ isn’t the best of them (surely that’s ‘A Hard Day’s Night’?), it’s the only one to feature their ‘Sgt Pepper’ alter-egos in a trippy animated fantasy that feels like a Terry Gilliam-designed album cover come to life.
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