YELLOW SUBMARINE (1968) - ****1/2

"Are you, er...blueish? You don't look Blueish."

Once upon a time, there was some rock band called The Beatles, who at best I'm vaguely aware of, and at worst mostly ignorant about. They came upon my radar when the Internet got their panties twisted over their upcoming edition of the ROCK BAND videogame series, which Microsoft spent a fortune after a brutal bidding war (pluck it GUITAR HERO!) buying up the rights. But I don't get it.

How can I be remotely intrigued by an act who can't even spell the word Beetle right? I know those English people have a different way of spelling, or just different slang compared to us, but this is silly phonetics and pompous arrogance. I mean do you see Pink Floyd call themselvs "Pink Floyed"? or "Nirvanah" instead of Nirvana? I think not. You goofball limeys.

Supposedly these Beatles were the biggest rock force ever seen, heard, or felt. Nothing before or since, not even Elvis or the Jonas Brothers, the latter which CNN thought last weekend was more newsworthy than those protesting Tehran kids fighting for their liberties. I guess the Beatles were like that, but 1000 fold. Rolling Stone magazine seems to think so, for on their epic Top 500 Albums list, 11 Beatles albums (more than anybody else) scored rankings, including 4 in the Top 10 and the exclusive #1 slot for their SGT. PEPPER'S LOVELY HEARTS CLUB BAND. See you learn something every day, for I didn't even know the Beatles scored that Bee Gees movie.

My parents also apparently loved them too at the time too, listening to their albums inbetween growing long hair, practicing free love, smoking dope, and finding creative ways to dodge Vietnam. That whole generation blames their breakup, along with Vietcong, Watergate, and JFK's assassination for why they are such irresponsible grownups. That would certainly explain Clinton and Dubya. So yeah thanks Beatles, for wreaking my present.

Allegedly, "The Fab Four" (I guess Marvel had trademarked "Fantastic" by then) were all individually talented musicians who've had either great or at least respectable careers after 1970. I wouldn't know, for I'm just writing what I've been told. I do know that one got shot by an obsessed fan, another lost alot of his money to a one-legged golddigger, the third once got stabbed in his bed repeatedly by a stalker, and the last acted in a Pizza Hut commercial. Well maybe not the second one, if you believe those conspiracy theories that the real second one died decades ago. I wanna laugh, but since I sincerely think Kurt Cobain was murdered, I'll shutup.

An interesting comment posted at Aint It Cool News' Talkbacks (a rarity) described The Beatles as "the first Internet band." Don't take that line literally, but if my parents are correct, these guys didn't just conquer the music industry in the 1960s. They were everywhere, a centralized fanatic sensation shared across the globe in Fashion, television, toys, merchandise, politics, movies, etc. They even had their own saturday morning cartoon on ABC. The closest subsequent comparison to that might be KISS and their comic book, but that's hardly qualitative. Not bad for some fellows who misspelled a bug's name

So I'm reviewing YELLOW SUBMARINE, which if you don't count their 1970 documentary LET IT BE, was the Beatles third and last movie. This followed the well-applauded seminal classic IT'S A DAY'S NIGHT and HELP!, which isn't. You know the idea of NIGHT considered to be "the father of MTV" intrigues me so I might check that out sometime, though what can I expect of a picture from the director of SUPERMAN III and the bad parts of SUPERMAN II? Anyway, the Beatles wanted to complete their three-film contract with United Artists, but since they didn't want to do a movie, an animated movie was their solution. SUBMARINE was directed by the same crew who produced that ABC cartoon:



Wow, now I feel awful for bashing on Filmation all these years. Jesus. For a project with their name it, featuring several songs from their catalogue (including new ones), they wanted nothing to do with it, not even bothering to voice-act as themselves. Gee I wonder why they had no enthusiasm at all for SUBMARINE. Then months later they were shown a roughcut:



And they go oh shit! How did they actually get involved with making not just a tolerable movie, but a rather darn good one without realizing it? How the fuck did that happen? To make-up for effectively dismissing SUBMARINE as a dirty paycheck and probably feeling like a bunch of assholes, they filmed a live-action ending coda for it. That was nice of them.

YELLOW SUBMARINE is a classic example of what choice you make when given something that on paper looks flimsy thin, and not much money to work with. You don't have the time or budget to go Disney with the articulated realist drawings. You're given a silly song to build a whole movie around, much less other songs that don't really connect together at all? So what do you do? Do you just say ah screw and not put much thought or energy because it's just another job like that BEATLES toon? Or do you decide to be motivated by your limitations and soldier through, and even thrive in spite of them?

Thankfully the YELLOW crew went the second route. Alot of people call YELLOW a psychedelic classic and made by people stoned for stoned viewers, but that's a disservice. For one thing, if YELLOW had been made by animators tuning in and out, the whole budget would have been blown on hundreds in pounds of macaroni, dozens of green bowls, and 5 minutes of scribbled papers taped together. Trust me, I would know. Second, since YELLOW can't go all Disney, those filmmakers instead to use that to their advantage by playing around with color scheming (purple faces?), and embrace the surrealism, thus marking out an auteur niche for themselves within the genre. Consider when water is splashed, its not droplets flying like you would expect, but instead you get like a paint brush smear. I dig that.

Besides, I don't see how some of these Beatles songs are drug-related or were inspired by narcotics. That's too easy of a copout, not even the notorious "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds." No sir, no way....No...

Lucy in the
Sky with
Diamonds

Oh my.

Alot of the crazy shit in YELLOW make absolutely no sense within our rationality, but they hold their own sort of logic. A flying fist that makes evil grin in space between fingers, "Snapping Turks" (stereotype with jaws in their stomachs), apple tossing giants, the "headlands" (hands sticking above ground), demusic missiles (or Nickleback in WMD form), and pushing the "cavalry" button (fires out horseback-riding U.S. Cavalry like you would see in Westerns). I like that one room in the Beatles Mansion which has giant statues of superheroes like Flash Gordon and The Phantom. Why? That's not the right question to be asking, its Why not? My favorite though has to be the monster who eats everything in sight, and I mean everything. Other creatures, the background, the film frame, and inevitably itself.

Of course that not-so-very-subtle allegory of anti-materialism fits perfectly into a 60s capitalism-fighting flower child like YELLOW SUBMARINE, with a peaceful utopian land of Pepperland (hippies) conquered by the music-hating Blue Meanies (Scottish Bagpipes are deadly to them) and their Mickey Mouse hats (corporate bastards). One of the Pepperland citizenry escapes to our reality to get the help of the Beatles to help free his world. Me I would have gone to the U.S. Air Force instead, but whatever. Love and Yes triumph over hate and No. The last song, a reprise of "All Together Now," subtitled in several languages. We're one world man, one people! Yeah!

BTW, I hope these cartoon Beatles aren't anything like the real-life ones, for they sure acted like dicks when their drummer gets jettisoned. They only go back to save him because they didn't want to start learning to play Trio. No wonder they broke up, I would have quit that shit too if my bandmates had left me behind with some dinosaurs. That sort of prank I wouldn't easily forgive, you know?

The story in YELLOW is irrelevant, for it's all about the soundtrack, and I must admit something that you fans of the bug band will roll your eyes at me, but the music here is pretty good. The YELLOW team must have thought so too, for they were obviously inspired in their art that they nearly sync up perfectly with the tone and rhythm of those songs. Really reminds me of another great tradition-breaking and utterly creative musical in PINK FLOYD THE WALL. Now here is where YELLOW truely breaks away from Disney by its willingness in experimentation of the visual storytelling narrative in using rotoscoping, engravings, symbology, pop culture iconography (as typified in Post-Modernism) and so forth.



YELLOW is really creative, charmingly fun, and unique (you know, effort?) and some ways the Pixar of its time in that it it holds basic appeal to children, and yet there is a surprising amount of sophisticated humor for adults with puns and even some risque innuendo. Like when someone brings up "condiments" someone knee-jerks responds in shock until they realize what was actually said.

The only fault I might find is the unlikely static ending, which begs me to wonder if YELLOW simply ran out of money by this point. Too bad if YELLOW was around today with the title vehicle lighting up a cigar for a monster, the MPAA would slap a R rating faster than Tehran secret police can bash a student's head in.

"It's blue glass."
"Must be from Kentucky, then."

"I've got a hole in my pocket."

"Hey, I wonder what'll happen if I pull this lever."
"Oh, you mustn't do that now!"
"Can't help it. I'm a born Liver-pooler."

"Today, Pepperland goes...Bluely!"

"Well, in my humble opinion, we've become involved in Einstein's time-space continuum theory. Relatively speaking, that is."

(And yes, I was kidding.)