Cinema
Yellow Submarine (U, selected cinemas)
In the spirit of the Fab Four
Mark Steyn
ter last week's South Park, Yellow Submarine is, whatever else might be said about it, a triumph of the animator's art, a gorgeously evocative Sixties pop-art fanta- sia. The film's look became so emblematic of its time — 1968 — and so ubiquitous in posters and album covers and films that it's easy to forget it was more or less invented for the occasion by a weird but winning combination of obscure artists and canny opportunists. Peter Max usually gets the credit for the picture, and is happy to take it, rarely bothering to correct the misappre- hension. In fact, it's nothing to do with him, and the celluloid psychedelia, though undoubtedly Max-esque, goes much further in its fusion of standard animation, cut- outs, still photography, processed live action and rotoscoping (the tracing off of live action images).
I have to say I'm not a big Beatles fan and if I never heard 'Love Me Do' or 'Paper- back Writer' again it wouldn't bother me my favourite song isn't by John or Paul but George's 'Something', and even then I pre- fer Nelson Riddle's wonderfully dramatic late Seventies arrangement for Sinatra. But, all that aside, it seems to me that the ani- mation of Yellow Submarine is perfectly attuned to the songs: it captures the eclecti- cism of the Beatles —the rock'n'roll and rhythm'n'blues, the bits of music hall whim- sy and half-understood nods towards pop standards; the fondness for sonic collage that comes from listening under the covers to Radio Luxembourg fading in and out. The title song of Yellow Submarine can be immensely irritating — 'And the band begins to play .. . Tiddle-dee-om-ti-tom-ti- tom, etc' — but it's a record only guys with a lot of different sounds floating around the back of their heads would make; and, on balance, that's better than the isolated genre ghettoes of today's pop.
`Yellow Submarine' was written for the Revolver album, and who knows what they were on when they first cooked it up. But when Al Brodax heard it he thought it was the perfect premise for the full-length ani- mated feature he wanted to make. Brodax wasn't exactly what you'd call a creative producer, but he had an eye for the main chance and figured that, if you made some of the Beatles's spacier concepts literal, you'd have the bones of a story. So in Yel- low Submarine the Beatles set out to save Pepperland from the anti-musical Blue Meanies, etc.
At the time, the Fab Four wanted nothing to do with it. Brodax was responsible for the Beatles Saturday morning cartoon series on American TV, which the boys hated. 'We look like four fucking Yogi Bears,' said John Lennon. In normal circumstances, they wouldn't have let Brodax anywhere near their catalogue, but he knew they owed United Artists the final film of a three-pic- ture deal and that, after Help! and A Hard Day's Night, the last thing they wanted was a full-scale acting assignment with prolonged location shoots. He sold it to them as an easy way out of a contractual obligation and made it even more painless by hiring four other fellows to do their voices: in Yellow Submarine, the Fab Four are actually played by a Faux Four — three actors and a bloke the director, George Dunning, overheard in a pub. The last, Peter Batten, who voiced . George Harrison, was arrested by military police while in bed with a film-company dolly bird towards the end of the production and has never been seen since.
Tom Stoppard, Joe Orton and Joseph Heller all had a crack at the script, but Brian Epstein selected a version by Erich Segal mainly because he liked the colour of the folder it was in. The distinctive look of the film was another happy accident: one of the animators was married to a German girl who happened to leave.a copy of Stern lying around on the coffee table. Inside was the work of a guy called Heinz Edelmann. He knew nothing about animation and had no sense of humour, but they hired him to design the film anyway, which he did by painting canvases which Jack Stokes then broke down and animated. Almost every sequence has something worth looking at: the mouse-eared dumpling Blue Meanies, brandishing their anti-music missiles, are among the most stylish cartoon villains ever; the hallway at Old Fred's pier is a sur- realist riot. One of the best segments, 'Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds', uses rotoscop- ing of old circus and vaudeville images: it was done just as a rough-cut, to get a sense of whether it would be right for the music, but it worked so well they left it just as it was. Another, 'Eleanor Rigby', uses photo- copied cityscapes to complement the flat, understated feel of the lyric. It's not neces- sary to be an admirer of either song (though I quite like 'Eleanor') to recognise that this is the best kind of musical film- making: time and again, the creators of Yel- low Submarine come up with visual images that brilliantly match the songs. The one exception is the newly restored number, `Hey, Bulldog', which provides one of the film's more pedestrian moments. Other- wise, you couldn't ask for a better illustra- tion of Richard Rodgers's dictum, that in a successful musical the orchestrations sound the way the costumes look.
Over the years, the Beatles themselves, who virtually disowned the film in 1968, have evidently come round to that way of thinking, too. Help! and Hard Day's Night are perfectly fine in their way, but Yellow Submarine seems imbued with the spirit of the Fab Four in every aspect, and its hokey musical-comedy plot about saving Pepper- land from the Meanies is exactly what a film about the dominant pop group of the era should be — a testament to the redeeming value of music.
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