Yellow Submarine

Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the Beatles’ glorious 40-minute musical masterpiece, had been enjoying enormous acclaim and popularity for about a year when the animated Yellow Submarine hit theaters in 1968, acting as a loose extension of the album’s contemplations on fame, identity and ‘60s psychedelia. The film’s recent frame-by-frame restoration, and translation onto Blu-ray disc, evokes more nostalgia than brilliance, save for one element: The unbelievable timelessness of the songs included on the soundtrack.
It’s not that designer Heinz Edelmann’s kooky, surrealist animation isn’t entertaining. Edelmann and director George Dunning’s broad palette and freakish creatures will have you reaching for the nearest hallucinogen (or the nearest exit if you’re taking a bad trip, man) and can creep out even the sober. But every time another Beatles classic hits your ears, it lifts the room and injects new life into the film. Whether it was a case of inspiration or coincidence, most of Yellow Submarine’s more creative and graceful visuals are those that complement the songs: “Eleanor Rigby” accompanies an animated Ringo walking through a grim, sad version of Liverpool that Banksy would appreciate. “Nowhere Man” is sung to little Jeremy Boob, a rhyming noodnik who knows everything but does very little.
Speaking of very little, the plot of Yellow Submarine is minimal. (That just means more time to concentrate on the loopy stuff.) Based on a McCartney-written song from 1966 and story by Lee Minoff, it follows the exploits of a captain who travels in a mysterious, magical submarine with the Fab Four to escape the bizarre Blue Meanies, an arrow-launching, gun-toting species who’ve launched a war on the captain’s peaceful home of Pepperland.