#Yellow submarine cartoon landscape movie

#Yellow submarine cartoon landscape movie

It’s rare to see a mainstream movie that revels so much in unchecked imaginative power. And I would argue that without the film’s embrace of psychedelic culture, its whole internal logic, or lack of logic, wouldn’t have been possible. But if Yellow Submarine is a period piece, it’s a very beautiful period piece to look at-and its core storyline, such as it is, is so familiar that it can still entertain kids and adults alike. Yellow Submarine is in a way a conventional story of good conquering evil, but it’s also a flimsy hippie parable with a mission to spread love and peace and flowers and music. With the Beatles’ blessing, the filmmakers conceived of a psychedelic fantasy for children, or, if you prefer, a children’s movie that young adult Beatles fans would also enjoy. (It’s now under the Apple label along with the rest of the Beatles’ canon.) Hence, it’s become canonical, and deserving of coverage here. It was Let It Be that finally met the need for a new film.) Although Yellow Submarine had no Beatle involvement in its creation, it became a key part of the Beatles’ mythology, and the Beatles themselves loved the finished product so much that they’ve taken ownership of it pretty much from the time of the film’s release.

(United Artists, unfortunately, held that Yellow Submarine didn’t count as a new Beatles movie, because the Beatles didn’t participate in the making of it at all, not even lending their own voices to the characters. Though never enthusiastic about the idea, the Beatles signed off on it and hoped to thereby be done with movies for good. Producer Al Brodax of King Features, who was responsible for the odious The Beatles Saturday morning cartoon show of the mid-‘60s (which the Beatles rightly loathed), had always hoped to parlay that deal into a full-length animated film, and there seems to have been a treatment for Yellow Submarine as early as 1966. The idea for an animated movie actually predates both those films, though. Still under contract to United Artists for a third movie, the Beatles- who hadn’t enjoyed making Help!-and who had been stunned by the negative critical reception of Magical Mystery Tour - were not in the mood to start in on another movie to fulfill their obligation. Of course, the switch to animation also suited their wishes at the time. So it’s interesting that, after the weirdness and excess of Magical Mystery Tour, the Beatles would literally be transformed into cartoons for Yellow Submarine. With each film that they released through the mid-‘60s, the Beatles became less human and more superhuman, less real and more hyper-real, in the public imagination.