Yellow Submarine
Once upon a time, or maybe twice, there was a land called Pepperland. Eighty thousand leagues beneath the sea it lay, or lie (Iâm not too sure).
Yellow Submarine was released in 1968, after the Summer of Love but before Woodstock, when the Beatles stood astride the world of pop music, and âpsychedelic artâ had such an influence that people actually read underground newspapers printed in orange on yellow paper. That was the year 2001: A Space Odyssey was released in reserved-ticket engagements with an intermission, and hippies would mingle with the ticket holders on the sidewalk outside the theater, and sneak back into the theater for the filmâs second half, to lay, or lie, flat on their backs on the floor in front of the screen, observing Kubrickâs time-space journey from a skewed perspectiveâwhile, as the saying went, they were stoned out of their gourds.
Yellow Submarine was also embraced as a âhead movie,â leading to an observation attributed to Ken Kesey: âThey say it looks better when youâre stoned. But thatâs true of all movies.â All of that was many, many years ago, and now here is a restored version of Yellow Submarine, arriving like a time capsule from the flower power era, with a graphic look that fuses Peter Max, Rene Magritte, and M. C. Escher. To borrow another useful clichĂ© from the 1960s, it blossoms like eye candy on the screen, and with 11 songs by the Beatles, it certainly has the best music track of any animated film.
The story begins at a moment of crisis in Pepperland, which is invaded by the music-hating Blue Meanies. They hate the power of Sgt. Pepperâs Lonely Hearts Club Band, which has inspired a big YES to sprout near the bandstand, not to mention a towering LOVE and all sorts of bright and cheerful decorations. So the Meanies freeze everything with blue bombs that bleach out the colors and leave Pepperland in a state of blue-gray suspended animation. Old Fred, conductor of the band, escapes the Meanie treatment and flees in the Yellow Submarine to enlist the help of the Beatles.
This is a story that appeals even to young children, but it also has a knowing, funny style that adds an undertow of sophistication. The narration and dialogue are credited to four writers (including Love Storyâs Erich Segal), and yet the overall tone is the one struck by John Lennon in his books In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works. Puns, drolleries, whimsies, and asides meander through the sentences:
Thereâs a cyclops! Heâs got two eyes. Must be a bicyclops. Itâs a whole bicloplopedia!
The animation, directed by Tom Halley from Heinz Edelmannâs designs, isnât full motion and usually remains within one plane, but thereâs nothing stiff or limited about it; it has a freedom of color and invention that never tires, and it takes a delight in visual paradoxes. Consider for example the Beatlesâs visit to the Sea of Holes, a complex Escherian landscape of oval black holes that seem to open up, or down, or sideways, so that the Beatles can enter and emerge in various dimensions.
(Ringo keeps one of the holes, and later gets them out of a tricky situation by remembering, âIâve got a hole in my pocket!â)
Such dimensional illusions run all through the film. My favorite is a vacuum-nosed creature that snarfs up everything it can find to inhale. Finally it starts on the very frame itself, snuffling it all up into its nose, so that it stands forlorn on a black screen. A pause, and then the creatureâs attention focuses on its own tail. It attacks that with the vacuum nose and succeeds in inhaling itself, after which nothing at all is left.
The filmâs visuals borrow from the mind bank of the twentieth century. Consider a visit to a sort of image repository where we find Buffalo Bill, Marilyn Monroe, the Phantom, Mandrake the Magician, and Frankenstein (who, awakened, turns out to be John Lennon). Dozens of images cascade out of the doors in a long corridor, including Magritteâs big green apple and his pipe. And real-life photography is built into other sequences, including the one for âEleanor Rigby.â
The songs of course are the backbone of the movie, and they include âYellow Submarine,â âEleanor Rigby,â âAll Together Now,â âNowhere Man,â âLucy in the Sky with Diamonds,â âSgt. Pepperâs Lonely Hearts Club Band,â âAll You Need Is Love,â and (in a live-action coda) the Beatles in person wisecracking and singing âAll Together Now.â The movieâs original soundtrack was monaural, and it sounds a little muddy on my rare laserdisc of the film. The restored version, in six-track digital stereo, remastered at the legendary Abbey Ro...