Music Month: Yellow Submarine (Dir. George Dunning, 1h 30m, 1968)

 All roads eventually lead to The Beatles. Without them, British music takes a very different direction, and British cinema with it, from the formative beginnings of the music video in their promotional films between 1965 and 1969, to the idea of music star as movie star, through A Hard Day's Night and Help! which present the Fab Four as fictionalised versions of themselves, to the divisive slice of British proto-psychadelia in Magical Mystery Tour to the documentary Let it Be, showing the band slowly drift apart. Their acrimonious split releases all four to become movie stars, especially in the case of Starr, and producers (with Lennon producing Alejandro Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain, and Harrison's Handmade Films Monty Python's and Terry Gillam's cinematic ventures, and a score of cult British films).

And then there is Yellow Submarine, a wild polychromatic adventure of an animated Beatles through surreal adventures to rescue the beleaguered Pepperland from the sinister Blue Meanies. Barely featuring the Beatles, except for their songs and a cameo shot after the film met with their approval, and largely regarded as a way to exit their contract with United Artists on an amicable high, it arguably did more than any other of their cinematic vehicles to cement the band as serious artists, certainly did more than any film since Disney's 1940 Fantasia (ironically, both largely consist of sequences set to music) to set out animation as a serious medium, capable of pure artistry rather than just entertainment, in what may be the single most important piece of British animation of the 1960s, if not the entire latter half of the 20th century.

The year is 1966, and The Beatles are hard at work on their seventh album, Revolver, an album that marked the band's slow move away from live performances towards an entirely studio-based band, at the start of London's growth into a capital of culture, and at a point where LSD, eastern philosophies and the avant-garde began to influence an ever-more experimental and increasingly musically adventurous band. Among these songs, of all things, is a children's song-as Ian McDonald writes, several decades on, this hallmark, this focus on the "nostalgia for the innocent vision of a child" is a unique element of the British psychedelia movement, and one that, unconsciously or otherwise, "Yellow Submarine" captures perfectly.

Sung by Ringo Starr, long the foil for the Beatles as the voice of innocence in their cinematic outings, and dotted with sound effects that show the band at their more playful-one may even say Goon Show-esque, what with the funny voices and outlandish sound-effects, it thus comes as a surprise when, combined with the opposite end of the Revolver experience, the dark and symphonic "Elanor Rigby", and for a band that, to this point, had never released singles containing tracks due for a studio album, "Yellow Submarine" becomes one half of a "Double A-side" single. Its release in the States not only intersects with Lennon's infamous comments about the band having become "bigger than Jesus", but also the rise of the counterculture, who took the song to heart as a (questionable) anti-capitalist anthem.

Whatever meaning one imbues "Yellow Submarine" the song with, from drug-trip as underwater adventure to a sloughing off of possessions to a simple children’s' song, much of this meaning converts to Yellow Submarine the film. Beginning by introducing the setting of Pepperland, a technicolour mix of Victoriana, English quaintness, and, inevitably for a film released in the 1960s, a degree of psychedelia (much of the film's staff have, of course, gone on record to state that none of the creations on screen are influenced by the degree of drugs that went into making the Beatles' records), the film then introduces the Blue Meanies, a veritable army of bizarre, unnerving and outlandish, and entirely blu-ish villains.

Here, the film's key designer, Heinz Edelmann makes his mark. The Blue Meanies are just the first of a veritable flotilla of strange and unusual figures that make their appearance, their blueness apocryphally an accident, the voice of the chief Blue Meanie (delivered by Paul Angelis, who also voices Ringo), a major influence on Mark Hamill's iconic voice for the Joker in the 1990s Batman The Animated Series, and the curiously familiar ears that each Blue Meanie wears a not-so-subtle swipe at the Walt Disney Studios. Nevertheless, this army of blue-themed oddballs makes short work of the placid population of Pepperland, leaving only Fred (British Comedian Lance Percival), to escape in the titular submarine, parked atop an Aztec-style pyramid. As the camera pans away, up to the sky, so the titles roll to the strains of, of course, "Yellow Submarine" as Fred makes his perilous journey across bizarre and beautiful vistas.

It's easy to regard Yellow Submarine, as a piece of animation, a simple childish thing. Animation in Britain in the 1960s was largely restricted to that of stop-start animation fare such as Trumpton and its sister series, a medium the UK has only continued to excel at since. Certainly, compared to both America and Europe, and indeed Japan, whose animation scene was beginning to boom in the latter half of the 1960s, British hand-drawn animation was very much a rarity-the most prominent film prior to this being 1954's Animal Farm, largely funded by the CIA and taking 15 years to recoup its budget. It's easy to thus look at Yellow Submarine as a risky shot in the dark, with, despite its budget being a fraction of the average Disney film, still £250,000, with its cost-cutting measures largely masked by clever animation and visual tricks.

Firstly, there is, of course, the film's heavy usage of limited animation-in short, where only certain parts of a figure, for example the arms, legs or head of a figure that otherwise remain stationary. Elsewhere in the film, such as during the "Elanor Rigby" sequence that introduces us to a comparatively dark and gloomy Liverpool, far from the colourful Pepperland, rotoscoping, whereby film footage is drawn over, and cut-out animation, where ready-made elements are animated, and which would later go on to exemplify the work of Python Terry Gillam less than a year later, figure heavily in the film;s opening sections.

From here, introducing Ringo as he is followed by the Yellow Submarine, we are thus slowly introduced to the Beatles in a series of strange scenarios, from John Lennon de-transforming from Frankenstein's Monster to George Harrison in a positively Indian-esque shrine, complete with sitar music and back-projected images of clouds and India It's also here that the film's sense of humour comes to light, from innumerable references to the Beatles' music, worked into the script by Liverpool poet Roger McGough, to a general sense of fun, animation used to add to or counterpoint these clever verbal gags, from a bizarre cameo by King Kong to a sly reference to Lumière’s L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat. With the Beatles complete, the quintet sets sail.

And it's here that we get perhaps the single most experimental sequence, of the film, a veritable cascade of images of the United Kingdom, expertly juxtaposing the rising final crescendo of "A Day in the Life" as holiday postcards and panning footage and the sights of the country give way to the Submarine setting sail to "All Together Now" (reprised by live-action Beatles at the end of the film), Victoriana steamship (or should that be steam-submarine?) interplaying with strange and outlandish undersea visuals, in the first of several sequences where the Beatles' music takes centre-stage. From here, the Beatles enter the Sea of Time, jokes about relativity rubbing shoulders with word-play, and a de-aged Beatles giving way to an older Beatles, as "When I'm 64" strikes up, the Submarine and its crew continuing their voyage across landscapes of watches, hourglasses, and ticking clocks.

Another spectacularly surreal moment, as the animators count out a minute (well, 64 seconds) in beautifully wrought numbers, as our heroes begin to realise they've crossed the sea of time, into the sea of science, an abstracted yellow submarine giving way to "A Northern Song", represented by sound-waves (not dissimilar to Fantasia's similarly minimalist sequence), oscilloscope and surreally rendered Beatles-represented by only hands, feet and faces, before giving way to rapidly flashing (and in modern honesty, a questionably seizure-inducing moment, as multiple Beatles cascade across the lined and chequed screen. Jettisoning an unexpected guest, the group carry on across a landscape of strange creatures, until Ringo suddenly launches himself out of the submarine and the remaining trio eventually agree to follow him.

Ringo rescued, and ending up inside a strange vacuum-esque beast, the Beatles find themselves in...nothingness, only to meet Jeremy Hillary Boob (Ph. D), a mocking, but gentle parody and satire of the late Jonathan Miller, and other great English polymath. He is subsequently regaled with "Nowhere Man", the otherwise white space of nothingness only making the colours that do appear in the sequence all the punchier, their reverse trip only making the small "nothing" more and more upset, until Ringo takes pity on him, and he joins the Beatles and Fred aboard the submarine. Here, Martin's score, which makes up the entire second half of the Yellow Submarine LP, is particularly notable, as the quintet of Boob and Beatles find themselves marooned, the submarine having been repaired and disappeared off into the distance.

Here we are left in one of the most impressionistic numbers, the moment at which the film's visuals most openly match the music, as "Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds" plays, the animation turning painterly, rough, unrestrained by models to keep to, paint outside lines, rough sketches positively daubed with paint, or in great explosions of pastels, the roughness of the animation, the inhibitions of the 1960s in full flow. Leaving the foothills of the headlands, the quintet find themselves in the Sea of Holes, a awe-inspiringly strange piece of animation that calls to mind the work of Bridget Riley, as the Beatles neatly riff off "A Day in the Life"'s holes (and their capacity to fill the Albert Hall), the animation in great wide shots showing off the Beatles as tiny figures, eventually escaping the Sea to arrive in Pepperland, just before Fred arrives, an orchestral version of "Yellow Machine" in tow, to rescue the mayor from his captivity.

Soon rescuing a set of uniforms and instruments from the heart of the Blue Meanies' camp, with pratfalls along the way, so the Beatles-now disguised as Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (to whom the actual Beatles' music is credited in the film), they make their way back to the petrified population of Pepperland. Cue "Sgt. Peppers", and the veritable freedom of Pepperland, as Meanie after Meanie is beaten back by this veritable music explosion, as colour returns back to the world, camera panning over the rejuvenated land as the Chief Meanie proceeds to plot his counterattack, led by Glove. This, of course, as the Marseillaise cuts through the mix, leads, somewhat inevitably to "All You Need Is Love", as Lennon, and a veritable wall of words that appear on the screen from Lennon's mouth, capture, perhaps better than the world-wide broadcast that premiered the song, the power of its words.

Rescuing the original Pepper Band, which, of course, brings a series of excellent jokes as each of the band is met with their doppelgänger, so we come to the film's one cut sequence, "Hey, Bulldog", cut out of the US release to either tighten the pacing of the film, or simply that, compared to the rest of the film, it's a so-so piece of music that aside from its appearance in this film, and the Lennon/McCartney freak-out at the end of the song, has little to recommend it. From here, care of Boob, the Chief Meanie is subsequently defeated, in classic Beatles fashion, not by violence but by peace. We're left with the critically underrated "It's All Too Much", a wall of psychedelic feedback freak-out, as close as the band ever got to musically depicting the acid trip, the visuals balls-to-the-wall weird, almost entirely static animation changing colours as the submarine floats across the screen, to cut to a live action Beatles, who go out with a reprise of "All Together Now".

Whilst its commercial success was not immediately felt (the film, whilst making back its budget comfortably, though director George Dunning, having ploughed his fee back into the film saw little of it, and never directed again, was not regarded as a runaway success), its critical success was more immediate, and its visual impact undeniable. The Beatles, to a certain extent, are beholden, in terms of their iconography, in homages to this, or indeed any era of the Beatles, and indeed British psychedelia itself is very much beholden to Yellow Submarine and the work of bands like Pink Floyd and Hawkwind, not to mention Hendrix. The Yellow Submarine, for its part has long entered the public conscience, from sculpture to die-cast toy to collector's Lego set, a shorthand of this most imaginative era of the Beatles.

Moreover, Yellow Submarine feels like a leap forward for British animation and comedy, this stealth vehicle that within a year would slip a sextet of clever young men from Oxbridge and Cambridge, including an American animator who riffed off Victoriana and the surreal, and a quintet whose jokes ping-ponged between the absurd, the surreal and the adventurous, and whose appearance in the USA in the mid 1970s would eventually be greeted with as large a fanfare as the Fab Four. Moreover, it sets the world of British animation apart, not merely a slavish imitator of the USA or indeed the European market, but with a bold, if bizarre sense of its own. Even now, the very notion of it being remade by Robert Zemeckis (an abortive mistake, and perhaps the one thing to ever thank uncanny valley diving exploration, Mars Needs Moms for) brought outrage, this childhood masterpiece thankfully unsmirched by CGI remake.

Perhaps its lasting impact is this. Half a century on, animation is rife with subversive, surreal, beautifully odd films, series and shorts like this. If the Blue Meanies mouseketeer hats are anything to go by, this film opened fire at the colossal, safe, sanctified Disney, and blew a hole right through them, sailing on to leave its impact everywhere from the Simpsons to British animation as a whole, this wonderfully strange surreal vessel bobbing along at its own pace as it courses through animation as a medium, its crew forced to make a masterpiece at a fraction of the competition. That Yellow Submarine is a positive kaleidoscope back in time to the feel and sound of the late 1960s is nothing short of a triumph. Long may it sail ever on through cinema.

Rating: Highly Recommended