To print this page, select "Print" from the File menu of your browser salon.com > Arts & Entertainment Sept. 2, 1999 URL: http://www.salon.com/ent/col/srag/1999/09/02/submarine A magical, movable feast The Beatles live again in the eye- and ear-popping new print of "Yellow Submarine." - - - - - - - - - - - - By Michael Sragow "Yellow Submarine" returns to the screen as razzle-dazzle entertainment and the mother of contemporary animation -- as audacious as "South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut," as beautiful and humane as "The Iron Giant," as witty and inventive as "Toy Story" and "A Bug's Life." It comes off as less of a period piece and more of a cartoon masterpiece than it did in 1968. Back then, as Pauline Kael pointed out, its flower-power theme had gotten out of sync with an increasingly frayed and abrasive culture. Now the call for peace and love through music is as novel and refreshing as the Beatles' hippie-dandy wardrobe. As always, what director George Dunning and designer Heinz Edelmann do with the material makes the film an undiluted delight. It isn't the pop sitar and bell-bottoms and giddy dorm-room graphics that ring an audience's bells. It's the filmmakers' bottomless well of inspiration. While building toward a counterculture utopia, the movie offers a psychedelic history of art in which Magritte co-exists with Milton Glaser. If it once gave off lulling whiffs of weed and incense, it now works like aromatic smelling salts to provide a welcome jolt to the system. Today it's hard to know what's more stimulating: the combination of bravura collage effects and literate off-the-cuff comedy (like Terry Gilliam's Monty Python cartoons) or the zing that all-out, trailblazing pop can bring to a full-length animated feature. We typically talk of movies as "experiences," when they're often high-tech experiments that reduce us to lab rats. "Yellow Submarine" is an experience -- an almost indescribable one. The story sounds too whimsical to stomach: A courtly old salt named Young Fred -- the Lord Admiral of a one-man fleet, on his maiden voyage -- takes a yellow submarine to Liverpool and cajoles the Beatles into rescuing the undersea paradise of Pepperland from the onslaught of the Blue Meanies. But in the "renovated" version opening in nine cities this month before arriving on home video, the images have an ecstatic lushness. It's as if the filmmakers print them directly on your optic nerve -- once they enter your consciousness, they stay there. And as heard in a gorgeous new digital mix, the songs really do have the power to soothe savage breasts and turn the chief Blue Meanie into an ambulating flower garden. "Yellow Submarine" boasts two of the most majestic sequences ever animated or filmed. In the "Eleanor Rigby" number, there's an electric poignancy to the Liverpool folk who spend their humanity in iron-cast habits and routines. It's nearly as engulfing as the kinetic rapture of the ethereal yet sensual dancers who cavort to "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" while colors shift and spill beyond their outlines. The moviemakers don't set up these sequences as high points. They're simply a couple of the extravagant wonders that spill out of a cornucopia bigger and more bounteous than the horn in Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Of course, Sgt. Pepper and his men turn up as the Beatles' alter egos in the film's alternative universe: they're the official group of Pepperland. The movie's boggling matter-of-factness is a key to its enduring -- no, its deepening -- charm. "Yellow Submarine" is a cut-up of a movie, in every sense of the word. Its benign, cheeky attitude extends to its freewheeling snip-and-paste shape. It's not a conventional fairy tale but a tapestry that develops its own protean personality as the filmmakers cunningly unroll it. Most of our best feature animators, like John Lasseter ("Toy Story," "A Bug's Life") and Brad Bird ("The Iron Giant"), wed their love of classic movies to their love of cartoons, giving their work the same impact as live-action spectacles filmed on creative galaxies far, far away from Planet Hollywood. "Yellow Submarine" doesn't move or develop like these or other movies, as Lasseter acknowledged when he picked it for a tribute at the 1997 San Francisco Film Festival and praised it for "telling a story in a striking graphic way." Sometimes it seems to put us on a moving sidewalk at a World's Fair art exhibit, with the Beatles' verbal byplay operating like a commentary beaming into our skulls from individual Walkmans. At other times it uses the ploys of slapstick or musicals or comic strips to toy with our expectations before sending us down, or up, another fresh route of fantasy. And at all times it follows the beat of a different drummer (say, Ringo), with a pace that encourages gleeful improvisation. The Blue Meanies, who have the heads of demented Mouseketeers and the bodies of plump male cheerleaders, propel an extraordinary array of thingamabobs against Pepperland, including the Snapping Turks, who sport killer-shark tummies, and the tall, thin, top-hatted Bonkers, who paralyze victims with big green apples. Best and worst of all is the Dreadful Flying Glove, which pays homage to exotic poetry -- the Blue Meanie instructs it to point, and, having pointed, pounce. Even when the Anti-Music Missiles start flying, the movie can stop for a spot of comedy, like the leader of Pepperland's classical quartet refusing to acknowledge the attack until his act is reduced to a solo. Pepperland is like the "Sgt. Pepper" album cover extended ad infinitum -- a flower child's garden of cultural influences, with a late-Edwardian ambiance that's both decadent and wholesome. And it has a boisterous inclusiveness without an inkling of political correctness. Everybody is invited to play. Director Dunning and designer Edelmann galvanized an eclectic effects and animation team and made use of a cadre of credited and uncredited writers (including "Love Story" author Erich Segal, then an assistant professor of classics at Yale). The result is steeped in all culture, high and low, not merely movies. If the story keeps it afloat, a gush of pictorial creativity gives it momentum, and the antic dialogue has the beguiling quality of nonsense literature or novelty song lyrics. "It's blue glass," John says of a bubble encasing Sgt. Pepper's band. "Must be from Kentucky, then," quips George. The blend even tickled the fancy of such a stern defender of High Art as John Simon, who dubbed it "a vast punorama" and wrote: "Visually, every conceivable style is thrown in pell-mell: there is Art Nouveau and psychedelic, op and pop, dada and surrealist, Hieronymous Bosch and just plain bosh. Why does it work? Because of its reckless generosity. The fact that Jugendstil is made to rub curlicues with Miro, that expressionism is obliged to lie down with the Douanier Rousseau, that the outrageous melange des genres is served up as demurely as the most ingenuous tossed salad -- in short, that it is so unselfconscious: that's what makes it click." He was right -- to an extent. But as the appositely named Dr. Bob Hieronimus lays out in "Hieronimus & Co.'s Yellow Submarine Journal" (an excerpt from the forthcoming "It Was All in the Mind: The Co-creation of the Beatles' 'Yellow Submarine'"), the movie was an astoundingly lucky hybrid of the unself-conscious and the hyper-conscious. Director Dunning and other members of his TV Cartoons company, who previously worked on the Beatles' banal Saturday morning cartoon show, had listened to early tapes of "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band." They knew that "Yellow Submarine" would give them a chance to immortalize the Beatles' metamorphosis from epochal rockers to avant-garde pop butterflies. That's why they went after designer Edelmann, who was then known as a cutting-edge graphics whiz for the German magazine Twen. By all reports a sober and hard-working crew, the filmmakers employed every ounce of craft and instinct to create a trippy aesthetic. The movie is usually described as a bath (or, as Simon put it, a sauna), but it rewards your waking attention. While you make the connections between all the unexpected activity within each frame and from frame to frame, and between the pictures and the words and music, underutilized areas of your brain shake off their dust and open up. Unlike a lot of famous "head" movies, this expands your mind without drugs. The last batch of "Yellow Submarine" videos, released a dozen years ago, were simultaneously bright and thin -- like the TV series animation Dunning and company were running away from. Since then, legal disputes have kept the movie from the public eye. Animation specialists aside, the only people who referred to it at all were rock critics doing Beatles retrospectives -- and they despise the soundtrack album and have put down the film's main influence, "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," as more of an artifact than a pinnacle. The Beatles, as George Harrison says, "hadn't really been that involved" with the movie; they feared a replay of their kid-vid series. They were even lackadaisical about the album, which put the four new songs and orchestral tracks next to reissues of "All You Need Is Love" and "Yellow Submarine" (unlike the forthcoming CD re-release, which promises to contain every tune in the movie). Indeed, the liner notes for one version of the record consisted of a rave review -- for "The White Album." So for rock fans as well as movie fans, this picture may be full of surprises. The soundtrack is boisterously alive, and not just when greats like "Eleanor Rigby" arrive: Simple anthems like "All You Need Is Love" or "All Together Now" soar in context, too. And "Nowhere Man" gains in tragicomic resonance from being tied to a marvelously irritating character -- a multiple-threat intellectual named Jeremy Hillary Boob, Ph.D. He looks like a droop-nosed, clean-shaven ewok and speaks in verse because (he says) "If I spoke prose you'd all find out/I don't know what I talk about." Despite its druggy aura, the film's ruling sensibility is sharp and together, whether the moviemakers are using "The Sound of Music" for a Blue Meanie joke or wresting a blackout vaudeville routine from the sexual chemistry between Fay Wray and the big ape in the old "King Kong." Even the characterizations of the Beatles, filled out with motifs from their entire multimedia oeuvre, are spot on. (John Clive, Geoff Hughes, Peter Batten and Paul Angelis provide the voices for John, Paul, George and Ringo.) Ringo roams Liverpool with the same sad, sentiment-filled eloquence that he did London in "A Hard Day's Night." John, Paul and George share a twisty give-and-take -- a genial sort of one-upmanship -- from the moment we meet them in an indoor-epic transformation of the trick townhouse in "Help!" (Indeed, George may have more of a personality here than he does in the flesh-and-blood Beatles films.) As an additional treat, the new print restores "Hey Bulldog," the one original song that was cut from the American release, and the one that rock critics adore. In the film, the Beatles sing it as they join forces with their Sgt. Pepper lookalikes to befuddle a four-headed Blue Meanie attack dog. This wacky, howling piece of Lennon-and-McCartney R&B, with its half-sincere, half-mocking refrain "You can talk to me," becomes the perfect aural setting for a slapstick nightmare. Deemed anticlimactic and cinematically jarring 31 years ago, it now gives gritty traction to the movie's beatifying finale. "Hey Bulldog" may not be as elegant as the other numbers, but "Yellow Submarine" is not eye candy anyway. It isn't just dessert: It's a five-course meal. salon.com | Sept. 2, 1999