Back in the mists of time, in the days before sat-navs were ubiquitous, my Dad used to play music during long car journeys. We always had the same selection of about two or three CDs and so, consequently, these became favourites. Two of these were ‘Run Devil Run’, a Paul McCartney solo album, and ‘In My Life’, a tribute to Sir George Martin, featuring celebrity cover versions of various Beatles songs. Can you think of anyone better to tackle the surreality of ‘Come Together’ and ‘I am the Walrus’ than Robin Williams and Jim Carey for instance?
So, in 1999, as we sat down to watch a film called Yellow Submarine on Channel 4 (the first time it was shown on British television for the first time since its theatrical release in 1968 – only Dad had actually seen it), I did have a vague sense of who The Beatles were. It turned out to be one of those defining moments, where a switch is turned on in your brain and you discover something that you love and that will continue to influence you. Yellow Submarine turned me into a fan, not only of the film itself and the Sgt. Pepper album, but The Beatles in general.
Yellow Submarine was the third Beatles film produced by United Artists after A Hard Day’s Night and Help!, made simply because they were contracted for three and, since the plan was to make it an animation, the Beatles themselves had little direct involvement. They were pleased enough with the end product to agree to appear in a small cameo scene at the end of the film, therefore satisfying their contractual obligation to UA of actually appearing in it. Doing what would later be done with the music of ABBA with Mamma Mia, the screenplay writers (Lee Minoff wrote the original treatment and the screenplay itself was penned by four collaborators with contributions by Liverpudlian poet Roger McGough, who was responsible for a lot of the dialogue’s crackling wit and for making sure that the Beatles actually sounded Liverpudlian but sadly wasn’t credited) took the Beatles’ music and used them to tell a story, only instead of a story of marriage and mystery parentage on a Greek island, Yellow Submarine is a hippie fairy-tale all about the power of love.
80,000 leagues beneath the sea lies the utopia of Pepperland, a place where everyone lives in harmony and beautiful things like music reign supreme. Their neighbours, the Blue Meanies, despise anything that brings joy and one day they invade, turning it from a colourful land of joy to a monochrome one of misery. One inhabitant manages to escape to seek help, in a yellow submarine. Finding himself in (then) present-day Liverpool, he comes across the Beatles, who agree to help, embarking on a zany journey and taking on the identity of Sgt Pepper’s lonely Hearts Club Band in order to bring happiness back happiness to Pepperland.
I was captivated from the start. The art direction and character design of German artist Heinz Edelmann gives the film the look of a pop-art Alice in Wonderland (appropriate, seeing as, reportedly, Lewis Carroll was one of John Lennon’s biggest literary influences). Moving away from the look of the Beatles cartoon, which the Beatles themselves hated and it’s easy to see why, the different animation styles/techniques – from traditional hand-drawn animation to rotoscoping and motion graphics – complementing the music brilliantly. There’s also a delightful air of “Art Student Project” about it, something that may or may not have anything to do with the fact that, due to being under a tight deadline of 10-11 months, in order to get the film finished on time, students from the local Art School had to be bussed in to form a night shift.
Take the ‘Eleanor Rigby’ sequence for example, where we first arrive in Liverpool. The use of real people and locations in the animation go hand in hand with the beautifully melancholy lyrics. It captured perfectly the nature of existential angst and despair long before I knew what they were or had the words to understand and articulate them. I played the VHS recording we made of this so many times Dad actually banned me from watching it… and then I found out he had the Sgt. Pepper album on CD.
Though the film wasn’t a smash hit upon its original release but it built up and maintained a large cult following over the years and it was definitely a forerunner to things like MTV music videos. Now it’s to the point where it was remastered and given a theatrical re-release in 2012. 2018 marked its 50th anniversary, celebrated by another limited theatrical re-release in July and a myriad of articles and merchandise, including a beautiful graphic novel version of the film, produced by comic book artist and writer Bill Morrison and published by Titan Comics. Whilst it is a little strange to see the story without the song sequences, the artwork is gorgeous – the colours more eye-popping – and, even in improvisations, the dialogue still has the wit and flow of the original.
Its continued appeal comes not only from the music (and this includes Sir George Martin’s instrumental score) but, like all the best films, because it is universal, timeless as well as pertinent. The Blue Meanies are comic caricatures but there are still those who desire to take away or deny peoples’ enjoyment of things which they don’t understand or like (and social media has allowed that particular cultural debate to get very loud and nasty). At the end of the day, Yellow Submarine’s message may have come out of the hippie politics of the late 60s’ but it’s still true today: “All you need is love.”
And at this time of year, or anytime when the deluge of bad news has made you forget just how far a little goodwill goes, what could be a better message than that?
