Is ‘Yellow Submarine’ An Animated Psychedelic Masterpiece Or Hoary Cartoon Cash-In?

I grew up in a Beatles family. My Dad was at their first American press conference in 1964. He and my mother loved their music, the only rock band they liked, as did my older brothers and sister, who bought their records as they came out. We even have a rule in my family not to play them during the holidays, as it sends my mother into a weepy, sentimental tailspin. Memory and nostalgia can often muddy our perception of a particular work, such was the conundrum I faced while watching Yellow Submarine, The Beatles’ 1968 animated musical.

I was 10 or 11 years old the first time I saw Yellow Submarine. It was a special showing on New York’s WNEW. Maybe even a midnight showing, a big deal in the days before cable television, let alone digital movies on demand. I was fascinated by the wild visuals, the funny accents, the oddball humor, and of course the soundtrack, featuring the cream of The Beatles’ psychedelic songbook. I have seen it countless times since then, especially after buying it on DVD and watching it with my daughter, another Smith raised to rightfully worship The Fab Four. The only thing I’ve never done is pause to take a step back and consider whether it was actually any good.

Conceived in the high-minded afterglow of 1967’s Summer Of Love and the creation of the concept album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Yellow Submarine was a way for The Beatles to fulfill a three-movie contract with United Artists. Busy planning trips to ashrams and nurturing their solo aspirations, the band was allegedly loath to participate in another film production. Instead, they OK’ed an animated musical, based on a storyline that incorporated elements of the playful 1966-penned title songand the Sgt. Pepper’salbum, wherein cartoon visages of the band, voiced by actors mimicking their sing-song scouse accents, cavort through a surreal wonderland, obviously influenced by the L.S.D. experience, or animators’ notions of what that was, in-between pre-natal music videos, whose imagery sometimes synched up with the plot.

“Once upon a time or maybe twice…,” the movie begins, emulating the band’s love of whimsical wordplay, as we enter a Technicolor paradise known as Pepperland, where dowdy people in Victorian garb chase butterflies and listen to string quartets. They are soon conquered, however, by the Blue Meanies, an army of dark-hued hobgoblins, killer clowns, Abraham Lincoln – lookalikes that drop Granny Smith Apples on people, indeed, the most heinous of all apples, and a fearsome flying glove that chortles as it pounds people into dust. I think I like these guys. I’m not sure why, but one of them has an Eli Wallach-style exaggerated Hispanic accent, which I think might be racist.

The only survivor is magenta-skinned sailor Old Fred, who boards a tricked out yellow submarine sitting atop a pyramid and makes his way to mid-‘60s Liverpool. Smoke billows from terraced row houses as “Eleanor Rigby,” The Beatles’ most beautifully depressing song, plays. Fred encounters The Fab Four, who live together in a giant house that’s a cross between the British Museum and a house of horrors, and enlists them in his quest to free the people of Pepperland and off they go.

To get back there they must pass through the Sea of Time, cue The Beatles song “When I’m Sixty-Four,” then the sea of science, which for some reason leads to  George’s woozy “Only A Northern Song.” Then on to the Sea of Nothing, where they sing “Nowhere Man,” and pickup Jeremy Hillary Boob Ph.D., a creature who looks like a cross between Alan Dershowitz and a koala. You see where this is going, right? Eventually they end up in Pepperland where their mid ‘60s psych anthems lay waste to the assembled Meanies, especially after John Lennon sings “All You Need Is Love,” which I can relate to, since I hate that song as well. We finally see the real Beatles at the very end of the film, where they crack a bunch of inside jokes before playing a proto-lyric video for “All Together Now,” a prime example of what John Lennon derisively called Paul McCartney’s penchant for writing “granny music.”

Judging it critically, Yellow Submarine is a bit of a mess. Besides its fantastical elements, the “plot” is unimaginative, the dialogue trite, and the tempo drags, as yet another music video is shoe-horned in, whether or not it jibes with the storyline. At the same time, the animation is marvelous to look out, veering between bubbly ‘60s pop art and surrealistic primitivism, at times so uncomfortably odd you imagine anyone silly enough to watch the movie while under the influence of mind altering drugs would have a decidedly bad trip. And in an age before music videos, it must have been a revelation seeing animated graphics for the duration of an entire song, let alone, some of the most adventurous and accomplished pop music ever created. Whether the film is a contract filling cartoon cash-in or a masterfully animated psychedelic timepiece is a hard nut to crack. In the end, I think it’s actually a bit of both, but that won’t stop me from watching it again. Memory and nostalgia are funny like that.

Benjamin H. Smith is a New York based writer, producer and musician. Follow him on Twitter: @BHSmithNYC.

You can buy Yellow Submarine on iTunes