Sea of monsters yellow submarine movie#
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Sea of monsters yellow submarine series#

Even for their own kids, Yellow Submarine was the perfect introduction to The Beatles. The story goes that Sean Lennon didn’t know his dad was a Beatle until he saw the film at a friend’s house John had to explain why there was a version of himself running around in a cartoon.

The film’s appeal to children proved useful to The Beatles too. They liked it so much, they even recorded a larky little live cameo to go at the end (certainly the worst bit of acting in the film).

Sea of monsters yellow submarine series#

The band were concerned, apparently, that an animated film would be too childish and naff – there was a Beatles cartoon series in the US they loathed – but instantly came round when they saw the final film. They didn’t even lend their voices, the Fab Four being played by actors instead. The fact that The Beatles stuck cast-offs on the soundtrack is indicative of how casually they took the movie. John Lennon announces that they’ve got caught up in Einstein’s space time continuum theory: “relatively speaking, that is.” When Old Fred bellows “won’t you please, please help me?” Ringo drolly charges him to “be specific”. When we meet Frankenstein, Ringo comments that he used to “go out with his sister, Phyllis”.

Sea of monsters yellow submarine full#

It's duly full of non-sequiturs, groanworthy/brilliant puns, and Beatles in-jokes, drily delivered in a deadpan Scouse tone, and often easy to miss (I certainly didn’t get a lot of them as a child). Amazingly, the poet Roger McGough was brought in to brush the script up, and to give the humour a home-grown Liverpudlian character. The story of Yellow Submarine may be paper-thin, but it’s funny. It’s perfectly surreal – but then, all cartoons are, with their fake danger, and squash-and-stretch exaggeration. But kids, too, are drawn to its kaleidoscopic nature, and easily follow the dreamy, free-associative approach to storytelling. Still, Yellow Submarine never gets too dark: yes, there’s a drug-haze logic to it, and the graphics that bloom and billow are hallucinogenic. The animation eats itself, and there’s something deliciously meta about the filmmakers’ approach they play with the cartoon form. I love the moment where a monstrous sucking beast hoovers up first other creatures, then the background, then his own body. Yellow Submarine realises the full potential of all that. And there are also suitably mind-blowing op-art style sequences – the seemingly infinite black-and-white sea of holes still freaks me out.Īnimation, in general, does possess an almost unique power to be, well, strange: you can create anything you can imagine, play wildly with scale and colour, even collapse space and time. While most of Yellow Submarine is in teeth-achingly bright hues, there’s also a rather sooty mixed media montage early on, to the mournful strains of Eleanor Rigby, that offers a haunting evocation of a Liverpool that’s far from the Swinging 60s of Carnaby Street. And it certainly isn’t Disney – the only other feature-length animation studio that was really a success at the time. Seas of monsters seem drawn straight from the animator’s subconscious. Watercolour shading on landscapes and plants lends an unsettling beauty.

Flat outlined figures look like Aubrey Beardsley drawings on acid. Flowers and foliage curl and multiply in eye-popping hues. The animation, led by Heinz Edelmann, is in the vein of psychedelic artists Martin Sharp and Alan Aldridge, or graphic design outfits of the era such as The Fool and Hapshash and the Coloured Coat. It’s about the most 60s thing imaginable. There, dressing up as – yes – Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, they unfreeze the people and melt even the Blue Meanies’ cold hearts by singing All You Need is Love. One Pepperland inhabitant, named Old Fred, manages to flee in a yellow submarine, and winds up in Liverpool, where he enlists The Beatles to help they voyage through various surreal, metaphysical ‘seas’ (the sea of time, the sea of holes) until they make it to Pepperland. But it is invaded by the Blue Meanies, who can’t bear music, or beauty, or happiness and turn its inhabitants to stone.

Sea of monsters yellow submarine movie#

I also had a DVD of it as a student, and – having just watched the new, beautifully restored version in the cinema, with a resplendently loud, crisp soundtrack – can confirm that, at 50, it’s aging remarkably well.įor the uninitiated, the movie tells the story – such as it is – of Pepperland, a peaceful place full of gardens and bandstands, 80,000 leagues beneath the sea. I should know: I was raised on it, courtesy of hippie parents and a beloved grainy VHS I must have watched hundreds of times.