But it still has an irresistible late ’60s spirit all of its own. In Beatles terms it feels like a ‘Sgt Pepper’ side project with a load of other off-cuts and outside influences merrily chucked into the pot. They’re voiced, a bit oddly, by actors and only appear briefly in a larking-about epilogue. It has flashes of winning silly humour (‘What day is it?’ ‘Sitar-day’), and who can resist the submarine turning into a cigarette lighter to the tune of the Hamlet cigar commercial? The Beatles themselves didn’t give a great deal to the film. But when already-existing songs like ‘Eleanor Rigby’, ‘Nowhere Man’, ‘All You Need Is Love’ and ‘Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds’ kick in, the whole thing soars and makes a strange sort of psychedelic sense. The fantastical story is happily all over the place, and the handful of songs written especially for the film aren’t especially memorable. Only The Beatles can help, and so an old sailor pitches up to Liverpool in a Yellow Submarine to collect them and take them on a mission to defeat the Meanies. Clearly influenced by Lewis Carroll’s Alice stories, ‘Yellow Submarine’ features a version of the band on the run through a series of hallucinogenic set-pieces involving bad folk called the Blue Meanies who are running riot in the seriously out-there Pepperland. But it’s weirder and scrappier than that, pitched somewhere dreamlike between childhood and adulthood. Now that the title track has become a nursery-school standard, you half expect this to be a kids’ cartoon. Instead, they enhance the overall impression that the movie is not playing by the rules of conventional animation.The Beatles put their name to no fewer than five films in their quick decade together, and while ‘Yellow Submarine’ isn’t the best of them (surely that’s ‘A Hard Day’s Night’?), it’s the only one to feature their ‘Sgt Pepper’ alter-egos in a trippy animated fantasy that feels like a Terry Gilliam-designed album cover come to life. Thanks to the movie’s rich visual palette, and the distinctive way that The Beatles are rendered, none of these budgetary pitfalls doom the film. With a budget of just £250,000 (roughly $4.5 million today), Yellow Submarine’s animation style is undoubtedly jagged, and the motion often feels jerky. As the only survivor, the Lord Admiral escapes in the yellow submarine and goes to Liverpool to enlist the help of the Beatles. There’s a flying hand, Ringo pulls a black hole from his pocket, and a man named Jeremy performs some “transformation magic” that makes roses grow out of the Meanies. The Blue Meanies take over Pepperland, draining it of all its color and music, firing anti-music missiles, bonking people with green apples, and turning the inhabitants to stone by way of the pointed finger of a giant blue glove. It’s sweet, simple, and filled with smart visual ideas. Pepper and the frozen citizens by extending an offer of friendship to the head of the Blue Meanies. The Beatles finally arrive in Pepperland, and they save Sgt. When the plot finally does resolve, it proceeds in a straightforward fashion. But you never know quite what’s around the corner, which makes all these diversions amusing despite their pointlessness. Often, they’re also vehicles for The Beatles’ signature, wordplay-ridden sense of humor. All going in and out of doors in about five seconds. They’re presumably just things The Beatles and director George Dunning thought looked cool. In the Beatles mansion, a weird alien creature, a floating hat, a black guy in a yellow suit, a butterfly, a womans hand, an eggcup, a tobacco pipe with a face, a rocking horse, a skull and crossbones, Batman, an umbrella and pair of glasses. These visual ideas don’t really have any deeper meaning. Why is the sub on a pyramid? That will soon be the least of your concerns. Yellow Submarine moves by intuition, creating new visual ideas with every step it takes. Instead, the band is flung this way and that, finding themselves in a world where the ground is made of pepper, and another where black holes are scattered across the floor. The Beatles spend most of the movie on the journey to Pepperland, but things rarely progress in a linear or even logical fashion. Pepperland’s leader sends for help at the last moment, and who do they wind up calling? You can probably guess. That party is rudely interrupted by the Blue Meanies, who freeze the citizens of Pepperland and drain the land of color. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club band is serenading a party. It opens in a paradise under the sea where Sgt. The actual plot of Yellow Submarine is simple, and not really the point of the film. Why tie yourself down when it’s just as easy not to? Yellow Submarine understands that animation is a medium that flattens reality and fantasy. But the animation allowed the Liverpudlians to tell a far more fantastical story without needing to worry too much about special effects. As with all the Beatles’ films, Yellow Submarine features plenty of Beatles tunes, as well as the band playing versions of themselves.
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