Yellow Submarine movie review (1968)

The animation, directed by Tom Halley from Heinz Edelmann's designs, isn't full motion and usually remains within one plane, but there's nothing stiff or limited about it; it has a freedom of color and invention that never tires, and it takes a delight in visual paradoxes. Consider for example the Beatles' visit to the Sea of Holes, a complex Escherian landscape of oval black holes that seem to open up, or down, or sideways, so that the Beatles can enter and emerge in various dimensions.

(Ringo keeps one of the holes, and later gets them out of a tricky situation by remembering, "I've got a hole in my pocket!")

Such dimensional illusions run all through the film. My favorite is a vacuum-nosed creature that snarfs up everything it can find to inhale. Finally it starts on the very frame itself, snuffling it all up into its nose, so that it stands forlorn on a black screen. A pause, and then the creature's attention focuses on its own tail. It attacks that with the vacuum nose and succeeds in inhaling itself, after which nothing at all is left.

The film's visuals borrow from the mind bank of the 20th century. Consider a visit to a sort of image repository where we find Buffalo Bill, Marilyn Monroe, the Phantom, Mandrake the Magician and Frankenstein (who, awakened, turns out to be John Lennon). Dozens of images cascade out of the doors in a long corridor, including Magritte's big green apple and his pipe. And real-life photography is built into other sequences, including the one for "Eleanor Rigby."

The songs of course are the backbone of the movie, and they include "Yellow Submarine," "Eleanor Rigby," "All Together Now," "Nowhere Man," "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds," "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," "All You Need Is Love" and (in a live-action coda) the Beatles in person wisecracking and singing "All Together Now." The movie's original soundtrack was monaural, and it sounds a little muddy on my rare laserdisc of the film. The restored version, in six-track digital stereo, remastered at the legendary Abbey Road Studios, blossoms with life and clarity. I was able to compare the two versions as a friendly projectionist switched back and forth between the original and restored tracks, and the digital stereo is like somebody turning the lights on.

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