And the aforementioned Max, who can’t please his boss by saying “no”, because he’s a “yes man”, or by saying “yes”, because the word is too life-affirming, can only appease the Chief Blue Meanie with the middle-ground, “Guy Lambardo?” (one of my girl’s favorite lines). Jeremy Boob’s patois is an endless string of punning rhyme. When a dreaded Blue Mean called an Apple Bonker confronts a disguised Ringo, he says, “Are you bluish? You don’t look bluish.” The Beatles characters (not voiced by the boys themselves) make terrible jokes throughout, the kind they made in real life in countless press conferences. It’s a sentiment perfectly summed in the anthemic “All You Need Is Love”.Īnd it’s funny. The movie’s message, though hardly original, is simple - the power of music and love to defeat the blues and to tame our harsher impulses. (My cats, you won’t be surprised to learn, are named Max and Jeremy.)
THE BEATLES YELLOW SUBMARINE MOVIE
The Disney classic Fantasia reveals similar imaginative exuberance, where storytelling follows directly from musical elements.įrom the Beatles’ doppelgangers, the four members of Pepperland’s house combo - Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band - (whose clothing comes straight off the cover of the Sergeant Pepper album), to virtuoso set pieces like “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” with its psychedelic coloration, the movie quotes from the Beatles words and music at every turn.Ĭharacters like Max, the Chief Blue Meanie’s hapless assistant, and Jeremy Hillary Boob (the “Nowhere Man”), are as fully realized, funny, and memorable as any cartoon creature you’d meet walking the streets of Disney World. The movie is a brilliant aggregation and re-imagining of the Beatles music. The suite he composed and rerecorded for the Yellow Submarine album, is some of the most under-rated film music I can think of, easily on a par, for melody and evocation, with the work of Ennio Morricone. It features, in addition to the Beatles’ music, a wonderful film score by “the fifth Beatle”, producer George Martin. The trailer provides a nice anthology of the various visual styles and graphic inventions employed throughout the movie. It is also a stunning visual work, combining the efforts of a team of talented illustrators lead by graphic designer Heinz Edelman (who passed away earlier this year). (I can’t think of another such.) You could call it the first animated rock opera. A setting of 15 Beatles songs, the movie is perhaps the first and only “animated music video album”. Yellow Submarine is the story of Pepperland, a city deep beneath the sea, and its invasion and subjugation by the evil Blue Meanies the journey in a yellow submarine of Old Fred, a retired mariner and cellist, to Liverpool to look for help the enlistment of John, Paul, George, and Ringo the wild and dangerous return trip through the Sea of Monsters, the Sea of Time, and the Sea of Holes the rousing of the sleeping Pepperites to battle, and the final triumph of Love over Evil.īut, it is quite a bit more than an animated movie. But, simply by virtue of their, admittedly inspired, extrapolation of words and images from the Beatles songbook, its producers managed to create a terrific film. It was, in fact, at least at first, little more than an attempt to cash in on the Beatles’ success by others. Released in November of 1968, the same month that The White Album came out, Yellow Submarine was produced with little involvement by the Beatles themselves. Yellow Submarine, the movie, is a great, great film for children and adults, and, in its own way, is as good a Beatles movie as A Hard Day’s Night.
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