(The Beatles, at that point, were changing their identities with each new album, an odyssey that became the template for more or less every pop star going forward.) "Yellow Submarine," in its very shape and form, is an orgy of metamorphosis, from the luscious candified utopia of Pepperland, with trees that look good enough to eat, to the industrial gray Liverpool that features a house of surrealist frenzy to the undersea dreamscape ruled by strobe-light fishies and a vacuum creature that sucks up everything around it (including the film itself) to the M.C. The movie's spirit descended directly from the Beatles, and that meant two things: Every moment in it was about love, and every moment in it was about change.
SUBMARINE CARTOON LIGHT MOVIE
In 1968, feature-length animation that played in movie theaters basically meant one thing - Walt Disney - and it seemed appropriate, and inevitable, that "Yellow Submarine" should be the anti-Disney fable, a teeming counterculture rabbit hole of good and evil, one that was as quippy-punny and crazy-sly as the Beatles' two live-action features, "A Hard Day's Night" and "Help!" (the main reason "Yellow Submarine" ever got made, according to John Lennon, is that "It was time for another Beatle movie"), and that possessed a visual splendor as psychedelic as it was storybook. Whatever era you're watching "Yellow Submarine" in, you always know who the Blue Meanies are.
Then again, the Blue Meanies really are mean - chirpy allegorical bullies with evil grins who have no master plan beyond the desire to stamp out joy. That's because the film is totally ironic about it it's such a knowing, joshing, postmodern parable of childlike innocence taking on the forces of destruction that almost every moment in the movie seems to make light of its own existence. (Around the same time, they were inventing music video, pioneering the notion of pop musicians as gurus of their own record label, and - on The White Album - throwing out hot, raw chunks of what would become the rock aesthetics of the '70s.)Īmazingly, the all-you-need-is-love-to-fight-the-Blue-Meanies flower-power fancifulness of "Yellow Submarine" never feels trapped in a late-'60s bubble. "Yellow Submarine" was a fairy-tale extension of the Beatles' brand, and one had come to count on a certain singularity from the Beatles, who lent that quality to everything they touched. In 1968, the movie definitely felt "different," but that was only to be expected. It's a delight to go back to, or to see for the first time, and what unites those two experiences is that even now, in the middle of the renaissance age of animation, "Yellow Submarine" stands apart, reminding you of what a cartoon feature can really be: a miraculous mutating object that keeps flipping reality inside out.
To commemorate its 50th anniversary, "Yellow Submarine" is being re-released, in a startling new 4K print (it was cleaned and restored by hand, one frame at a time), by Abramorama, the distribution company that had a success two years ago with Ron Howard's deft and revealing early-Beatles-on-tour documentary "Eight Days a Week." The "Yellow Submarine" revival kicked off on Monday, July 9, and the movie, which is playing in 79 theaters, will be expanding throughout the summer.
Taken as a whole, it's singular and sublime - a fusion of Peter Max and Lewis Carroll, Salvador Dalí and Madison Avenue - and audiences now have a special chance to taste that magic on the big screen again. If "Yellow Submarine" is a movie you grew up with, I'd wager that you could be enraptured by any random image from it.
SUBMARINE CARTOON LIGHT SERIES
The Beatles' celebrated cartoon feature, directed by the Canadian animator George Dunning (who had overseen the Beatles' weekly cartoon series for ABC-TV), came out in 1968, and it's remarkable to consider that in all the years since, no mainstream animated feature has come close to matching - or even trying to match - its majestically trippy pop-art dazzle.
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