Yellow Submarine Blu-ray Review
Don’t be a Blu meanie—get this disc!
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, June 4, 2012
If Norman Rockwell was American's "national" illustrator for the bulk of the first half of the twentieth century, the counter
culture had its own upstart artist, one whose approach was distinctly at odds with the photorealism of the iconic
Saturday Evening Post cover painter. Peter Max's brightly colored, quasi-hallucinogenic offerings seemed to
capture the
zeitgeist of the sixties in a way that no other of his contemporaries was quite able to. Though Max is
often incorrectly attributed as having designed
Yellow Submarine, there's little doubt that his spirit, if not his actual
artistic contributions, infuses much of the look of the film, vociferously contrarian opinions by the actual filmmakers and
animators nothwithstanding. (It may be no mere coincidence that one of the chief villains—albeit a lovable if
dunderheaded one—in the film is named Max.) While the song "Yellow Submarine" may have helped spark the genesis of
the project, as Production Supervisor John Coates discusses in his commentary included on this Blu-ray, it was actually the
then very successful Saturday morning King Features cartoon version of
The Beatles that had spurred serious
interest in developing a full length animated feature for the Fab Four. But the
look of
Yellow Submarine,
part Peter Max but pretty much all Op and Pop Art, became the film's most lasting legacy, and now the film is debuting on a
pretty spectacular looking Blu-ray that features a hand done frame by frame restoration replete with a new 4K scan of the
elements. Psychedelia has never looked quite this good before, and aging hippies may well be able to have virtual
flashbacks without any chemical or herbal enhancement whatsoever.
When The Beatles made
A Hard Day's Night in 1964, they (and director Richard Lester) basically reinvented the
"rock star" film. Prior to that anarchic offering, rock and pop stars tended to be featured in either throwaway dramatic
or
light comedy fare (think of Elvis Presley's starring vehicles) or were shoehorned into musicals (witness the film careers
of
singers like Cliff Richard and Pat Boone). But The Beatles' approach was one of skewering their own "insta-fame", and
the
madcap look at their supposed private lives was almost like an update of a screwball Marx Brothers film from a
generation
(or two) before.
Help! was a little more plot driven than
A Hard Day's Night was, if only incrementally,
but a
lot had happened between that second film in 1965 and 1967, the timeframe when
Yellow Submarine was in its
nascent planning stages.
Two of the most salient things that had happened personally to The Beatles in this period were their experimentation
with various mind altering drugs and, for George Harrison at least, a newfound interest in Eastern mysticism.
Professionally the group had just released their most ambitious and genre bashing album to date,
Sgt. Pepper's
Lonely Hearts Club Band, a pop tone poem of sorts that seemed to push the group into a cultural stratosphere that
not even they had experienced prior to the album's release. What better way to capture the kaleidoscope of new
influences the group was experiencing both personally and professionally than in an animated film, then? While that
might
seem to be a reasonable answer, it actually turns out that The Beatles were simply looking for a quick
and easy way to fulfill their contract with United Artists and
Yellow Submarine seemed to present an opportunity
that required little of their actual time, since the voice work for the spoken elements in the film would be done by hired
hands, not the Fab Four themselves.
The kind of funny thing is, as spacey and undeniably hallucinogenic as
Yellow Submarine is, it's in some ways
the most classically structured of any of The Beatles' brief
oeuvre of films. An undersea paradise known as
Pepperland is full of the music of the spheres, or at least the oceans, until a vicious invading horde of Blue Meanies
makes the country tuneless. An escapee from Pepperland travels in a magical yellow submarine to Liverpool where he
connects with The Beatles and persuades them to return to Pepperland to defeat the Blue Meanies and restore music
and happiness to his native region. That of course is the barest of outlines, and in fact the film is itself kind of an
outline which relies on the ravishing Beatles score to fill in the blanks. While some of the tunes are rather oddly
shoehorned into the putative storyline ("Eleanor Rigby", for example), the amazingly inventive animation that
accompanies all of them make any qualms rather minor and short-lived.
If there is an undeniable Peter Max-ian vibe to a lot of
Yellow Submarine, it must also be granted that designer
Heinz Edelmann brought an astoundingly wide array of techniques to the film, techniques which still dazzle to this day,
especially in this lustrous new presentation. Edelmann liked using cut out figures (something that Terry Gilliam would
mimic in his iconic animated sequences for
Monty Python's Flying Circus), but combined with the cut outs are
actual live action film elements (including a "cameo" of sorts featuring the actual Fab Four) and all sorts of graphical
elements which include everything from gears and cogs to numbers and words dancing across the screen.
Yellow Submarine is a synesthesiac assault on the senses that ends up blending sight and sound in completely
magical ways. If you've never done drugs,
Yellow Submarine is probably one of the best recreations of a "trip"
imaginable. If you
are "experienced" (as the sixties vernacular once coined it),
Yellow Submarine will
probably be a festival of hallucinogenic memories. Even without the psychedelic reference points, the film is an
incredibly inventive, lovable piece of charming entertainment that is also surprisingly smart and funny a lot of the time
(one of the
co-writers was none other than Harvard and Yale professor Erich Segal, soon to set the bestseller lists aflame with
Love
Story). While
Yellow Submarine may be an indelible relic of the sixties, it has retained a certain
timelessness that is still immensely pleasurable today.
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