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.
Beatles yellow submarine full#
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.
Beatles yellow submarine movie#
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. The film is one of the pioneers of rotoscopy, a technique that consists of tracing over motion picture footage, frame by frame, to recreate it in animation.I should know: I was raised on it, courtesy of hippie parents and a beloved grainy VHS I must have watched hundreds of times. ), Yellow Submarine presents itself, as soon as it is released, as a masterpiece of animation, as much for its colorful universe, its games of shapes and scales, as for its avant-garde technical work. And the magic worked: composed of several short films, each more surreal scenery than the last (the sea of holes, the sea of time, the kaleidoscopic kingdom of Pepperland. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band came out, they decided to use its psychedelic universe as a backdrop.
Beatles yellow submarine series#
Al Brodax, one of the producers of an animated series already devoted to the group, gathered a creative team to stage the film, directed by Canadian director George Dunning and German illustrator Heinz Edelmann. While none of the members of the group wanted to tackle the project, Epstein found a compromise that would allow them to have as little involvement as possible: an animated film they would only have to record the sound for. Constrained by a commitment between Brian Epstein, their manager, and the distribution company United Artists, they were obliged to provide a third. In 1967, the Beatles had already signed two movies, Help! and A hard day's night.
0 kommentar(er)
