They respond to every inquiry with a default “no,” shoot anti-music missiles leaving the watercolor panoramas a drab grey, and won’t be satisfied until they’ve bashed all that is pure in the world to smithereens.
The little blob-shaped aggressors represent everything in life that might harsh a good vibe, fascists mixed with the Man finished off with a dash of the cops forcing the party to turn the noise down. No Eden can last, however, and the pristine Pepperland comes under attack by the war-crazed Blue Meanie tribe in a whimsical blitzkrieg. The influence of happy psychedelia seeps in from the first frames, as two rows of suited men sprout rainbows out of their heads the words “LOVE” and “YES” dot the landscape like doodles on a Haight concert poster.
In a montage splashed with color and accompanied by a legato orchestral selection, birds happily chirp and flora blooms as children frolic around statues of giant hands clasped in cooperation. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Pepperland is an idyllic paradise hidden beneath the sea where all is kind and harmonious. A children’s film about pacifism winning out over imperialist annihilation might seem an odd combination, but in the cannabis haze after the Summer of Love, nothing made more sense.īefore the lads enter the picture, director George Dunning opens with a prologue setting the scene of Pepperland and defining the beauty at stake. Some armchair historians pinpoint the horrors of Vietnam as the last gasp of American morality in the 20th century, but in the Beatles’ Elysian strawberry fields, the winning formula of friendship, positivity, and the power of music could still be enough. The fantastical story of the Pepperlanders and the Blue Meanie menace is resistance cinema in the truest sense, albeit in a register so idealistic it barges past the point of naïveté. While the first act includes a canny artist’s rendering of a dreary industrial London, Yellow Submarine drifts along with the currents of a Vietnam-era United States in which the hippies were finally pushing back against the jackbooted status quo. More than their own celebrity archetypes, the Beatles bore the weight of their time, both responding to and dictating the course of the flower children’s peace-and-love zeitgeist. We meet hapless everyman Ringo kicking a can and muttering “woe is me” in a trash-strewn alley, tormented artiste John is a Frankenstein’s monster who must drink a potion to become human, sitar glissandos announce the arrival of zen philosopher George as he meditates in the wind, and pretty boy Paul pops out of a doorway to the sound of raucous applause, catching a tossed bouquet of flowers without even looking. The script for the 1968 feature, now celebrating its 50th anniversary with a restoration and rerelease into theaters, is well aware of this, introducing each member of the band in a setting that plays to their popular myth.
That’s all no matter - the Beatles always had more utility as concepts than people, as repositories for our ideas and feelings and memories about them.
Yellow submarine cartoon movie free#
One afternoon of riffing in a studio would be sufficient to get them off the hook, and then the increasingly divided men would be free to go their separate ways. After the production process on the Help! film left the Beatles with a bad taste in their mouths, they figured the most hassle-free way to fulfill their contract for another picture with United Artists would be a cartoon that they could mostly sit out. The Fab Four make a cameo appearance as their live-action selves to do some light prop comedy and cue up the final sing-along of multilingual toe-tapper “All Together Now,” but for the animated majority of the run time, their two-dimensional avatars are voiced by actors doing extremely convincing impressions of the legends from Liverpool. Excepting five minutes near the tail end of the film, the Beatles are nowhere to be found in The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine.
0 kommentar(er)
