Yellow Submarine (film)

• 1. Introduction

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  Yellow Submarine, the 1968 animated musical film inspired by the music of the Beatles, opens not with its famous band but with an act of colour theft. The Blue Meanies sweep through Pepperland, draining every hue from the landscape and freezing its residents into grey statues. It is a strangely melancholy premise for what would become one of the most visually inventive films of the twentieth century. Directed by George Dunning and shaped visually by art director Heinz Edelmann, the film managed something few animated works had before: it was taken seriously. Filmmaker John Lasseter, who would later lead both Pixar and Disney as chief creative officer, credited the film with generating wider interest in animation as a serious art form. In the West at the time, animation was generally considered a children's medium. Time magazine wrote that Yellow Submarine delighted "adolescents and aesthetes alike". Half a century after its release, critics still rank it among the greatest animated films ever made. Yet the story of how it got made is full of reluctant participants, a deserting soldier, an accidentally changed colour palette, and a live-action cameo filmed in a single day against a plain black background.

• 2. A Reluctant Commission

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  The Beatles had no great desire to make another film. Their second feature, Help!, directed by Richard Lester in 1965, had left them dissatisfied. An animated film, however, seemed a tolerable way to fulfil their remaining contractual obligation to United Artists for a third picture. Many fans later assumed the cartoon did not count toward that contract; it did. The documentary Let It Be, released in 1970, was an entirely separate matter and had no connection to the original three-picture deal.

  The screenplay was the work of four collaborators, including Erich Segal, building on an original story by Lee Minoff based on the Lennon-McCartney song. The dialogue is thick with puns, double entendres, and Beatles in-jokes. According to production supervisor John Coates, speaking on the DVD commentary track, many of these lines were written by Liverpudlian poet Roger McGough, who received no credit in the finished film. Coates noted a biographical coincidence: at the time, McGough was married to Thelma Pickles, a former girlfriend of both Lennon and McCartney.

  George Harrison's recurring line "It's all in the mind" was lifted from The Goon Show and had also appeared in The Beatles animated series, in the episode "Strawberry Fields". The film's structure follows the template of Walt Disney's Fantasia: a loose story designed mainly to present music alongside images, one set piece following another. It was, as the production understood it, a modern fairy tale for a hippie audience.

• 3. Edelmann's Visual World

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  Heinz Edelmann's visual design has often been mistakenly credited to Peter Max, the psychedelic pop artist whose style closely resembles the film's. Edelmann, along with contemporaries Milton Glaser and Seymour Chwast, actually pioneered the psychedelic visual language for which Max later became famous. The confusion is understandable; the resemblance is strong. But the film's saturated, surrealist imagery belongs to Edelmann.

  The Blue Meanies themselves almost looked very different. Background supervisor Millicent McMillan recalled that they were originally intended to be red, or even purple. When Edelmann's assistant accidentally changed the colours, the villains became blue, and with that accident came a shift in the film's entire symbolic register. Production supervisor Coates also noted in the commentary that the "Are you Bluish? You don't look Bluish" joke in the film was a deliberate pun on a then-contemporary expression. He acknowledged it referenced the casting of Jewish actors as villains in movies but stated it was not intended derogatorily.

  The animation directors were Robert Balser and Jack Stokes. The overall director George Dunning supervised more than 200 artists over 11 months. Creative director Charlie Jenkins was responsible for the entire "Eleanor Rigby" sequence and the submarine journey from Liverpool through London to splashdown, as well as "Only a Northern Song" in the Sea of Science. The "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" sequence was Dunning's own concept; he handed it to Bill Sewell, who delivered more than thirty minutes of rotoscoped images. By the time that footage arrived, Dunning was unavailable, and Bob Balser, with the help of Arne Gustafson, cut it down to its final length. Critic Pauline Kael, in her positive review of the film, noted how sharply Edelmann's approach contrasted with the work of Walt Disney Animation Studios and other Hollywood animation of the era.

• 4. Voices and a Soldier

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  Early press reports promised that the real Beatles would voice their own animated characters. That never happened. The band composed and performed the songs but beyond that their only direct participation was in the film's closing live-action scene. Actors voiced the animated Beatles throughout: John Clive as John Lennon, Geoffrey Hughes as Paul McCartney, and Dick Emery as the Lord Mayor, Max, and Jeremy Hillary Boob Ph.D.

  The story of George Harrison's voice is stranger than any of the film's plot points. According to the special features on the Yellow Submarine home media release, Peter Batten voiced George for roughly the first half of the picture. Before he could finish recording, he was discovered to be a deserter from the British Army of the Rhine in West Germany and was arrested. Paul Angelis, who was already voicing Ringo and the Chief Blue Meanie, stepped in to complete George's remaining dialogue.

  Lance Percival voiced "Young Fred" and had a prior connection to the band's world: he had also provided the voices of Paul and Ringo for the United States ABC television cartoon series The Beatles. The animated personas themselves were modelled on the Beatles' actual appearances at the Sgt. Peppers press party, held at manager Brian Epstein's house on the 19th of May 1967.

• 5. The Live Cameo and Its Constraints

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  The real Beatles appear only at the very end of the film, in a brief live-action scene filmed on the 25th of January 1968, shortly before the band travelled to India. The cameo existed primarily to satisfy their contractual obligation to actually appear in the picture.

  Originally, the producers intended to place the four men against a psychedelic post-production background with visual effects. Time and budget constraints made that impossible, and the final scene was shot against a plain black background. The gap between the animated characters and the real men was immediately visible: by January 1968, both John Lennon and George Harrison had changed their appearances since the Sgt. Peppers party on which the animated versions were based. Both were clean-shaven, and Lennon had grown his hair longer and added mutton-chop sideburns. Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney still looked close enough to their cartoon versions.

  The cameo ends with Lennon looking through a telescope and warning the audience that "newer and bluer Meanies" have been sighted nearby, urging everyone to sing along to keep them at bay. The film closes with the cast and audience joining in "All Together Now", the song's title appearing onscreen in translation after translation.

• 6. The Music and Its Origins

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  Beyond the 1966 title song, the film drew on a broad range of Beatles recordings, including four songs that had not previously been released. "All Together Now", "It's All Too Much", "Only a Northern Song" (originally recorded during sessions for Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band), and "Hey Bulldog", written by Lennon, were all new to audiences. "Baby, You're a Rich Man" had appeared as the B-side to "All You Need Is Love" in July 1967.

  George Martin composed and arranged the film's orchestral score. One of its cues, heard just after the main title credits, had a prior life: it was originally recorded during sessions for "Good Night", a track on the White Album, and had been intended as the introduction to Ringo Starr's composition "Don't Pass Me By". That cue was eventually released as "A Beginning" on the 1996 Beatles compilation Anthology 3.

  "Hey Bulldog" was cut before the US theatrical release, leaving the international version with a shorter battle scene in its place. The song was not seen theatrically in the United States until 1999, when a restored version received a limited run. Its first restored US theatrical showing was a one-week engagement at Denver's Esquire Theatre, presented in DTS digital stereo sound. The orchestral pieces from George Martin's score also found an unexpected second life: they were used in the short NASA films made for the Apollo 9 mission.

• 7. Reception and Lasting Influence

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  Yellow Submarine grossed $993,385 in the United States and $282,158 in other countries, for a worldwide total of $1,275,543. On Rotten Tomatoes it holds a 97% approval rating from critics. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave it three and a half stars in his original review, writing that it "exists on two levels with nothing in between. It is beautifully simple and childlike on one level, and erudite and deep on another." He later upgraded the film to four stars and placed it on his The Great Movies list. The film was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation in 1969 and for the Grammy Award for Best Original Score in 1970, and it received a Special Award from the New York Film Critics Circle in 1968.

  The Beatles celebrated the film's July 1968 release with a submarine-themed event at the Royal Lancaster Hotel in Bayswater, London, attended by guests all wearing yellow. In a 1980 interview, Lennon said: "I think it's a great movie, it's my favorite Beatle movie. Sean loves it now, all the little children love it".

  The film's stylistic influence spread widely. Edelmann's limited animation approach, particularly the Eleanor Rigby sequence, paved the way for Terry Gilliam's animations for Do Not Adjust Your Set and Monty Python's Flying Circus. It also shaped the look of the Schoolhouse Rock vignettes for ABC and the visual style of early seasons of Sesame Street and The Electric Company. Only one Yellow Submarine animator, Ron Campbell, later contributed work to the Children's Television Workshop.

• 8. Afterlives and Unrealised Sequels

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  Rights to Yellow Submarine followed a complicated path through the decades. Of all the United Artists Beatles films, it was the only one UA retained the rights to, until Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer purchased UA in 1981. Sony Pictures Entertainment led the consortium that acquired MGM and UA in 2005.

  In 1985, original producer Al Brodax began developing a spiritual sequel called Strawberry Fields, based on the song "Strawberry Fields Forever". The project was to be produced with the New York Institute of Technology Computer Graphics Lab and intended as a largely CGI film, though characters were to remain traditionally animated due to the technological limits of the time. Because Apple Records no longer held the rights to the original Beatles recordings, the soundtrack would have featured cover versions by artists including Michael Jackson, Cyndi Lauper, Crosby Stills and Nash, and Stevie Ray Vaughan. Brodax left the project between 1990 and 1992 and was replaced by Dutch director Rene Daalder. Polish painter Jacek Yerka was hired as a concept artist; several of his paintings, including Broken Picnic, Technobeach, and Creation of Life, were created for the film. Production drawings resurfaced in 2019, and in 2024 a work-in-progress reel was found and posted to the Internet Archive.

  A CGI remake came closer to realisation. In August 2009, Walt Disney Pictures and Robert Zemeckis announced plans for a motion-capture remake, officially unveiled at the inaugural D23 Expo on the 11th of September 2009. The cast included Peter Serafinowicz as Paul, Dean Lennox Kelly as John, Cary Elwes as George, Adam Campbell as Ringo, and David Tennant in talks to play the Chief Blue Meanie. Disney shuttered Zemeckis' studio ImageMovers Digital in May 2010, and on the 14th of March 2011 abandoned the remake entirely, citing the catastrophic opening weekend of Mars Needs Moms. Zemeckis briefly pursued other studios but by December 2012 told interviewers: "That would have been great to bring the Beatles back to life. But it's probably better not to be remade."