Led by brilliant, visionary designer Heinz Edelmann and director George Dunning, a team of mostly young, unsung artists toiled away in rinky-dink offices in Soho Square, London, for nearly a year, with a budget of less than $1m. They weren't the first to do so, but their work influenced generations of graphic designers. The artists who made Yellow Submarine celebrated words and numbers as art. Or all the times LOVE, KNOW, OK and other words appear as monuments in Pepperland. Like in the incredible When I'm Sixty-Four sequence of animated sentences and numbers. There never was a complete script, and much of it was apparently written on the fly – one of the reasons the movie has such a stream-of-consciousness, dream-like appeal, and an important lesson to more anal writers like myself. Words aren't just spoken: they appear on screen. At some point during production, he was called in to do a pass on the script and make the dialogue more Liverpudlian and authentic and, by many accounts, it was he who added so many great jokes and Beatles-style wordplay. I can't talk about the comedy in Yellow Submarine without giving a nod to someone who wasn't given a nod in the movie, but by all accounts was largely responsible for much of the humour: Liverpool poet Roger McGough, also a favourite of the Beatles. Sure, there are other influences (and the Beatles themselves loved stuff like The Goon Show and Edward Lear), but I think the Beatles' impact on modern comedy is sorely unappreciated. That lightness, that quickness, that unembarrassed, unencumbered willingness to be goofy – that's all very Beatlesque. Lisa needs braces and the orthodontist gives her gas, whereupon she goes into a psychedelic trip – Lisa in the sky (without diamonds) – that is a brilliant parody of Yellow Submarine. You know that one?" And of course he knew, because he was of a generation that grew up loving that movie.Īnother example is in an episode of The Simpsons called Last Exit to Springfield. After the table-read of the script, I told the director: "Make it like that George-on-the-mountain-top scene in Yellow Submarine. Remember in the chilli episode, where Homer eats the "insanity pepper" and goes on a trip? As it begins, Homer is seen floating against live-action clouds. No animated anything that enables us to laugh at ourselves while being highly entertained.Ī couple of specific references from The Simpsons. Without Yellow Submarine there would never have been The Simpsons, no Futurama, no South Park, no Toy Story, no Shrek. It was satire and art and, most of all, subversion. But after Yellow Submarine, it was a wholly different world. Only the Fleischer brothers in the 1930s dared to do really weird stuff with their early Popeye cartoons, and most of that is unknown to the general public. But it still has an irresistible late ’60s spirit all of its own.Before Yellow Submarine, animation was a mild, goody-goody world of personality-free gloved mice and cartoon bears stealing picnic baskets. 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. 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.
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