It's also called I-have-no-idea-what-those-hippies-in-Soho-are doing-but-it-has-the-Beatles'-name-on-it-so-I-guess-we'll-make-money. It's called trusting in artists and letting them do their stuff. It's how The Simpsons came to be, and it's how Yellow Submarine happened. So how did all this happen? Well, here I do need to get into a little back-story, because it's an important lesson in how brilliant things get produced. If you freeze-frame it, you can see some of the brilliant tricks they came up with. They used media no one had ever thought of using in animation: the sequence where the sub takes off from the Pier and appears to travel rapidly through all sorts of live-action settings, including a park where a statue of a military man astride a horse appears to tip his hat to you, was all done using postcards. The artists and directors used techniques no one had ever used before, and haven't since. There are sequences like Eleanor Rigby (where, by the way, you can actually see some of these unsung artists) and Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds that are pop art masterpieces as good and breathtaking as any Warhol or Picasso. 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.
#BEATLES YELLOW SUBMARINE CARTOON MOVIE#
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. Before Yellow Submarine, animation was a mild, goody-goody world of personality-free gloved mice and cartoon bears stealing picnic baskets.
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