< BACK
When the Beatles' animated feature, "Yellow Submarine," was originally
released in 1968, it got lukewarm to bad reviews, and pretty much broke
the cinematic momentum the Fab Four had going after the stunning success
of "A Hard Day's Night" (1964) and "Help!" (1965).
But time has been unusually good to the movie. Thirty-one years later,
in a newly restored print with DTS Digital Sound via the Egyptian
Theater's brand-new sound system, it seems a glorious explosion of music
and color, and one of the defining moments of the '60s counterculture.
The film's breeding is surprising: It was financed by King Features, a
division of the Hearst Corp., and one of its screenwriters was Erich Segal
("Love Story"). The Beatles do not speak their own voices -- which
explains some of the original critical animosity toward it as a
"non-Beatles movie."
¡¡
Still, the Beatles appear in a brief live-action finale, the overall
animation style seems to be emulating "A Spaniard in the Works," John
Lennon's 1964 book of stories and drawings, and the film is a kind of
extended LSD-inspired tribute to Beatle lore.
It opens in a happy place somewhere beneath the sea called Pepperland,
whose peaceful citizens are attacked and imprisoned by a band of baddies
called the Blue Meanies -- all except for Fred, the conductor of Sgt.
Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band, who escapes in a Yellow Submarine.
The sub emerges in Liverpool, where Fred corrals John, Paul, George and
Ringo to return with him in a confusing journey through a series of seas
-- the sea of monsters, the sea of holes, the sea of green -- to fight the
meanies with an infusion of music, color and positive energy.
Along the way, we're treated to 12 Beatles songs -- classics like
"Eleanor Rigby," "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds," "Nowhere Man," "When I'm
Sixty-Four," and four written especially for the film (one of which, "Hey
Bulldog," never appeared on the original U.S. release).
As designed by Heinz Edelman and director George Dunning, each song is
played against a visual sequence in a different artistic style --
surrealism, art nouveau, pop art, opt art, psychedelia -- and ranges from
the silly to the elegant to the achingly poignant.
All together, the film makes up a kind of compendium of the various
artistic fads and eclecticism of the '60s, and the animation itself is so
rich and experimental and outrageously imaginative that it amounts to its
very own festival of animation.
Historically, this animation would prove to be highly influential. It
marked a clear break with the reigning Disney style, and inspired
virtually everything that came after. "Toy Story" director John Lassiter
has called it "a landmark in animation history . . . the first real pop
animated feature."
As many critics have pointed out over the years, "Yellow Submarine"
also embodies, between its lines, exactly what the Beatles represented
emotionally and philosophically in the mid-'60s: artistic daring, cheeky
non-sentimentality, a new generation taking over, naively confident the
world was "getting better all the time."
From
<
BACK