Hi, kids. You know how unmoved I am by psychedelia and pop-art and by things so keyed into their times that they lose all resonance within a matter of years. The incredible gift of screenwriter Lee Minoff and director George Dunning was to reach into the excess of the universe surrounding them and pull out something of sobering humanity and undenaible beauty.
YELLOW SUBMARINE is not just about a band or a time; it is about the importance of that band and that time, about the quest of mankind to learn from everything with which we are confronted, to challenge the Blue Meanies not with retaliation but with the necessity of all the things they want to deny. The reason it is a film marketed for children is that children are smart enough to see this not as naivete but as wisdom and, hopefully, to carry it with them.
It's not that I don't understand psychedelia -- drugs replacing imagination -- or pop art -- the need to take nothing you see for granted no matter how artificial, but if you're bright you have that anyway. It's that I can't relate to them. And I think this movie, which sounds like little more than a marketing bonanza -- biggest band in the world gets animated, defeats baddies -- has nothing to do with either. This movie is not about rejection or decadence or laziness, it is obsessed with the beauty in everything, and by extension the humor in everything. Yoko Ono wanted to teach the world to fall in love with absurdity; the Beatles wanted to teach the world to fall in love with every passing second. YELLOW SUBMARINE is a celebration of these core values that defined a rising culture that, I hope, is still rising.
The Beatles' contract with United Artists, done up while they were still under the Berry Gordy-like dictatorship of Brian Epstein, called for three feature films, only two of which had been completed. A third, which later evolved into the Who's QUADROPHENIA, had been called off, and a miserably bleak TV special, MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR, was never issued theatrically. During their commercial monopoly in the early '60s, amid all the toothbrushes and board games and locks of hair sat a truly off-the-wall TV cartoon turning the Beatles into Three Stooges-like caricatures. (If you haven't seen it, I have. Don't bother.) Someone arrived at the solution of filling out the UA contract with an animated film. Despite what seems like ambivalence toward the whole idea, the Beatles flew along with it, basically ignoring it -- they refused to do voiceovers, and donated just four new songs, all subpar SGT. PEPPER rejects.
However, this is a project about which the filmmakers cared very deeply. Sometimes you can hide apathy in a live-action feature, sometimes it can even be faintly charming, but in animation it is impossible. You can feel how bored, for example, the Disney staff was with 101 DALMATIANS just by glaring at its lazy backgrounds and choppy movement. THE BULLWINKLE SHOW, of course, requires no comment.
But YELLOW SUBMARINE is, visually, the most stunning hand-drawn animated film ever, so incisive and blissful is its incorporation of unusual effects and intoxicating visuals. It's tempting to recall FANTASIA with its note-perfect marriage of music and art, but you know me and I have to bring up Vince Guaraldi, whose unlikely matching up with Charles Schulz offered a collaboration that became an impossibly moving feast for the senses in one special or film after another. Dunning and Minoff clearly have more than cash and contract at stake here... this is a labor of love, and their astonishing interpretation and comprehension of the Beatles' music continues to impress to this day. A dazzling selection of Beatles classics fills the ears with joy while the eyes investigate a new world of dreamlike elegance.
A witty, picture-book story recalls HELP! -- Richard Lester's brilliant reaction to his friends' overwhelming fame -- in its insistence of the Beatles as artifact, all hanging around in the same bizarre place, thereby reflecting the sensibility more of their godlike "I Want to Hold Your Hand" state, with the universal and soul-stirring impact of that early music, than the more commonly associated SGT. PEPPER era. A lonesome, lovingly rendered Ringo is called upon to bring help to the people of Pepperland, rescuing their peaceful society from the clutches of the Blue Meanies, who hate music and dancing and all things lively and good. Simple-minded, of course, but the satire is often incisive and more often just audaciously weird. It never veers into uninvolving silliness.
And I don't think this is a picture of naive innocence. Many an aging boomer has revisited the film on their super-classy 5.1 systems to conclude that there was a kind of childish narrow-mindedness to the popular perspective of the era. Such an argument doesn't seem to go far beyond the level of "There's no such thing as a Blue Meanie." Omigawd, really? No, life isn't that simple, but this is a cartoon, and there is nothing -- nothing -- naive about a desire to end oppression and cruelty; personally I'd go so far as to say that it's not naive to believe that music can free a person, even momentarily, from such dread, that the cellarful of noise really could save the world and still can. I never hear "She Loves You" without sitting up straight in my seat and feeling insanely glad to be alive. So whatever the aging hippies may think, if they find this to be didactic now, they never believed in their own message in the first place. Which doesn't surprise me.
To move toward the aesthetic, well, every frame of YELLOW SUBMARINE is painterly and precise and simply beautiful. The complexities of the film made it a task, but the animators fortunately understood the importance of the final product and have turned it into something at which we can marvel. It seems like much more than a cartoon... a film that really is enormously comforting and powerful.
The dialogue has the same goofy sting of A HARD DAY'S NIGHT, and it's a thrill to watch the Beatles defeat all adversity, but inevitably, the most memorable sequences -- and my god, they're incredible -- all revolve around music. It's humbling to watch the animators weave Paul's "Eleanor Rigby" far beyond reach into a phenomenal, jet-black portrait of a decadent, broken London... bringing the indirect trifles of McCartney's bleak lyrics to humbling life. In Dunning's hands, every song means more -- "Nowhere Man" is suddenly associated with companionship and rejection (with and of the eccentric Jeremy Hillary Boob, Ph.D.) more than self-pity, "All You Need Is Love" actually sounds like the sincere anthem it isn't, and wow... "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," a pleasant little nothing of John's, becomes ethereal and eloquent in the film's loveliest moment, a dance that somehow defines the fusion of music and love and maybe love itself. There's magic in here.
Nearly as important as the Beatles' flawless pop compositions is George Martin's vibrant score, fascinating enough to be extremely valuable on its own, but as fusion with the film it is heavenly -- let there be no doubt of Martin as the Beatles' unlikely soulmate and ultimately their savior, but also let there be no doubt of his own eternal gifts. This is one of the most skillfully subtle and moody film scores I know of, stretching across the animation with shocking grace.
For a child I think this movie might mean everything. I was eight when I saw it the first time but I can't think of a movie with more potential to be valuable at such a vital time, save perhaps WATERSHIP DOWN, the one animated film I rate above this one. I think the things YELLOW SUBMARINE has to say -- without preaching or even making its bent known on the surface -- are things very much worth knowing and savoring. It does not condescend; it means to illuminate, and that's what we need, a lot more than what we have now.
Assuming that the flick would be mere product, the Beatles flocked to screenings and found themselves shocked by the care taken with the feature, moreover embarrassed by their neglect of the project. They needn't have been; Dunning, Minoff, and their astonishing crew were just giving back some of what the Beatles had given the world, which was plenty... and still is.
CREDITS
Directed by GEORGE DUNNING Written by AL BRODAX / JACK MENDELSOHN / LEE MINOFF / ERICH SEGAL Produced by AL BRODAX Score by GEORGE MARTIN Animation director ROBERT BALSER Cast: THE BEATLES / PAUL ANGELIS / JOHN CLIVE / DICK EMERY / GEOFFREY HUGHES / LANCE PERCIVAL
DVD REVIEW
Some of the extras on this disc are just strange, but they're fairly informative and interviews with the cast members are a delight. Image and sound quality are superb. Grade: 93%.
