Heinz Edelmann

• 1. Introduction

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  Heinz Edelmann was born on the 20th of June 1934 in Ústí nad Labem, a city in Czechoslovakia known in German as Aussig, to a family with mixed German and Czech roots. By the time he was twelve, that family had been expelled from the country they called home. Twelve years later again, he was enrolled at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. And somewhere between those two upheavals, a sensibility was forming that would eventually fill the screens of cinemas worldwide.

  When the Beatles needed someone to design the visual world of Yellow Submarine in 1967, they found Edelmann. The film came out in 1968 and brought him recognition far beyond West Germany. But what kind of artist was he before that moment? And what did he do with the rest of a long career that stretched all the way to Stuttgart in 2009? Those are the questions this documentary follows.

• 2. Expelled and Educated

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  Wilhelm and Josefa Edelmann raised their son Heinz in Ústí nad Labem in Czechoslovakia. In 1946, the entire family was expelled into Germany, a fate shared by many families of German ethnic background in the postwar years. Despite their mixed roots, they were not exempt. They settled in the western part of Germany, and it was there that young Heinz found his way toward art.

  From 1953 to 1958, he studied printmaking at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, the Düsseldorf Arts Academy. After graduating, he started out as a freelance illustrator and designer, taking work in theatre poster design and advertising across West Germany. Then, in 1961, he secured a regular position that would define much of the decade for him: illustrator and cover designer for twen, an internationally known youth magazine that ran his work until 1969.

• 3. Yellow Submarine

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  During 1967 and 1968, Edelmann worked on Yellow Submarine, the animated film tied to the Beatles. His role covered art direction and character design. The film was released in 1968 and carried his visual imagination to audiences around the world.

  It proved difficult to build on that particular moment. From 1968 to 1970 he was a partner in a small animation company in London, but his ambition to work on further feature films went unfulfilled. After leaving London, he completed one final project in the visual mode of Yellow Submarine: a book called Andromedar SR1, published in 1970, which described a voyage to Mars. That work served as a deliberate closing chapter for a distinct graphic style he had developed.

• 4. Amsterdam and Beyond

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  In 1970, Edelmann moved to Amsterdam, where he shifted toward book jacket design and posters for plays and films. Among the commissions he took on there were the cover for a German edition of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and illustrations for Kenneth Grahame's children's book The Wind in the Willows.

  His return to Germany came through teaching. Between 1972 and 1976 he taught industrial graphic design at the Fachhochschule Düsseldorf, the Düsseldorf University of Applied Sciences. He then moved on to a lectureship in art and design at the Fachhochschule Köln, Cologne University of Applied Sciences. In 1989, he became Professor of Illustration at the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart, the city where he would spend his final years.

• 5. Curro and the Final Years

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  In 1992, Edelmann designed the official mascot for the Seville World's Fair. The mascot, named Curro, became one of the more visible public commissions of his later career, seen by visitors from across the world who attended that exposition.

  Heinz Edelmann died in Stuttgart on the 21st of July 2009 from heart disease and kidney failure. He was 75. His long arc from a postwar expulsion in Czechoslovakia to a professorship in Stuttgart, with a stop in the middle that put his drawings inside one of the most-watched animated films of the 1960s, traced a path that few designers of his generation could claim. The mascot he left behind in Seville stands as an unexpected last echo of a career built on making images that moved people.