Yellow Submarine

Part 2 - Analysis

Formally, the film is rooted in a range of sixties pop styles, and the eclecticism of its colour imagery (designed largely by German poster artist Heinz Edelmann) is derived from a vast range of popular contemporary approaches, including imagery culled from the pop art paintings, prints and designs of artists such as Peter Blake and Andy Warhol, the ‘op’ art of Bridget Riley, surrealist and expressionist art, the psychedelic graphics of British and American underground poster designers such as Martin Sharp and Rick Griffin, and the work of popular illustrators such as Alan Aldridge, who was apparently initially involved with creating some of the draft drawings for the animation.13 Looking at Yellow Submarine with the benefit of almost thirty years hindsight, the cutting-edge, contemporaneous, ‘now’ aesthetic of its imagery inevitably makes it appear as something of a museum piece to the modern eye, yet in its day the animation was accurately described by Joel W. Finler as a ‘remarkable summation and integration of the best in British and American pop design of the sixties’.14

Considering the imagery and allusions of the Beatles’ music of this period, it is perhaps unsurprising that one of the most pronounced styles to be absorbed into the film’s animation is that of British and American psychedelic poster art. In the mid-sixties, the cheap disposability of affordable, mass-produced psychedelic posters became heavily absorbed into pop culture through the work of such artists as Nigel Waymouth (of ‘Haphash’) and Martin Sharp, one of the key designers of Oz. Although such a-commercial posters and magazine pullouts sometimes had quasi-political or overtly propagandist purposes (such as ‘Legalize Pot’ or ‘Plant a Flower Child’), their central purpose seemed to be more concerned with celebrating, through a combination of photo-montage, reworked fine art and original cartoon-style graphics, the spiritual benefits of different kinds of mind expansion, their hallucinatory aesthetic obviating the need for their copious colourful typography to be totally legible or conventionally ‘understandable’. The psychedelic poster art of the aforementioned designers (and indeed the literary illustrations of Alan Aldridge and the psychedelic photography of Richard Avedon15) popularized the use of bright primary colours and surreal imagery derived from the urge to produce art which simulated the LSD experience. The animation style of Yellow Submarine is also heavily influenced by the psychedelic aesthetic and, beyond the story itself, the film boasts iconography which, in its use of colour and patently psychedelic imagery, mimics that of the underground press and American West Coast poster design. Perhaps the best example of this can be seen in the simulated ‘trip’ sequence which accompanies Harrison's ‘Only a Northern Song’. Here, bright strobes of alternating primary colour and close-ups of the Beatles’ ears attached to frequency monitors emphasize a higher reality than that of the objective world and, in the employment of irrational imagery and a visceral onslaught of ‘mind-blowing’ colour, attempt to simulate a hypnotic ‘psych-out’ of epic proportions.

Like psychedelic poster art, the animation also invests in elaborate and fluorescent ‘Disney-style’ typography, although unlike so many West Coast designs, the lettering is never so elaborately transformed that it becomes illegible. Although often hypnotically multiplied a la Warhol, the lettering never ceases to have an implicitly rational meaning within the narrative’s fantasy discourse. Indeed, so important is the meaning of lettering within the narrative that it actually becomes integrated causally into the dramatic action. Such is the case in the ‘All You Need Is Love’ sequence towards the end, when the deadly and menacing ‘Glove’ is kept at bay by John, who physically bombards it with the word ‘Love’ whilst simultaneously delivering the song.

The film's iconography also shares psychedelic art's nostalgic celebration of all things Edwardian. Indeed, just as the sinewy art nouveau imagery of Aubrey Beardsley became integrated into many designers' work (see, for example, Martin Sharp’s Bob Dylan poster of 1967, ‘Blowing in the Mind’), so it finds its place in Yellow Submarine, and it is interesting to note that the inhabitants of Pepperland (grandfathers on penny-farthings, servants, maids and colourfully uniformed soldiers) are almost uniformly pseudo-Edwardian in appearance. Indeed, what could be more fundamentally Edwardian than Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band itself? Interestingly, much of the Beatles’ music from this period was also deeply rooted in a desire for historical pastiche. While songs such as ‘When I’m Sixty Four’ were, as we noted in the last chapter, essentially attempts to recreate the atmosphere of the music hall, ‘Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite’, for all its psychedelic allusions, is fundamentally Victorian in essence, inspired as it was by a real Victorian circus poste: picked up at an antiques shop in Kent by Lennon. As George Melly maintains in Revolt into Style, ‘Alone in pop, with the possible exception of the Kinks, the Beatles are at their happiest when celebrating the past. They display little enthusiasm for the way we live
now.

Elsewhere, the film integrates the styles of other forms of popular posters and contemporary pop art, most specifically through the fascination with famous images of icons from contemporary anc historical stage, screen and comic-book art. Indeed, while the images of non-psychedelic contemporary poster art employed huge blow-ups of such vintage icons as Charlie Chaplin, Humphrey Bogart and Laurel and Hardy, the pop art paintings and graphic designs of Peter Blake anc the screen prints of Andy Warhol became preoccupied with images of contemporary stars such as Elvis Presley and the Beatles themselves. These contemporary obsessions are constantly present in Yellow Submarine, although perhaps the best example is the sequence in which Ringo and Old Fred are searching for the other Beatles and move into a vast anti-chamber populated solely by historical figures (General Custer), screen stars (Monroe, Astaire), and comic-book heroes. Tellingly, their collage-style presentation closely resembles Blake's layout for that most enduring image of sixties pop graphics, the Beatles' Sergeant Pepper cover.

Finally, the film also manages to employ imagery from a number of more exclusively ‘fine’ art disciplines, and the influence of Warhol's pop art is never far away. However, perhaps the most obvious homage to his style is present in the extraordinary ‘Eleanor Rigby’ sequence and, although the sad characters which populate the desolate Liverpool cityscape are the thematic antithesis of his own glamorous subjects, their execution bears startling iconographical and textural resemblance to his mid to late sixties polymer paint and silk screen prints. Equally obvious is the influence of Bridget Riley’s op art; the bedazzling black-and-white imagery in the ‘Sea of Holes’ sequence shares the same disorienting geometric distortion of space and perspective as much of her playful mid-sixties work. Elsewhere, the film also manages to integrate images from less contemporary art. Indeed, while the semi-abstract colours and shapes of the ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds; sequence might be tentatively described as a kind of animated Kandinsky on acid, the pulsing, melting clocks which appear in the ‘Sea of Time’ scenes are directly lifted from Dali's masterpiece, The Persistence of Memory (1931).

In his astonishing survey of pop art culture, George Melly analyses the eclectic form of sixties iconography. In his discussion of psychedelic poster art (and specifically the notorious ‘Haphash’ design group) he draws the following conclusion:

... when it comes to imagery there is no attempt to conceal a magpie approach to any artist past or present who seems to strike the right psychedelic note. As a result the ‘Haphash’ posters are almost a collage of other men's hard-won visions: Mucha, Ernst, Magritte, Bosch, William Blake, comic books, engravings of Red Indians, Disney, Dulac, ancient illustrations of treatises on alchemy; everything is boiled down to make a visionary and hallucinatory bouillabaisse.17

He could have been discussing the visual approach of Yellow Submarine. Although, as we have seen, the film occasionally absorbs its imagery from different sources, the iconoclastic approach to imagery is fundamentally identical. Not only does the film absorb the inherent and exclusive properties of psychedelic art, it also applies the same selectively eclectic approach, and it is clearly no coincidence that the styles which it tends to absorb (particularly surrealism and op) are fundamentally implicitly ‘hallucinatory’ by nature. They do indeed strike the ‘right note’.

Beyond its imagery, it is perhaps also productive to apply this theory to the highly eclectic methods of animation technique, which comprise conventional cel animation, rotoscoping (the technique of simulating animated drawings over live-action sequences), and conventional live-action sequences (the final sequence where the real Beatles make a fleeting guest appearance). Although alternating between the first two techniques was not especially new to animated features (it had been used in Disney films since the thirties), Yellow Submarine integrates these styles simultaneously rather than interchangeably, using them together to create the disorienting ‘trippiness’ for which the film has become justly renowned.18

If the film's form is heavily influenced by psychedelic principles, then so too is the narrative, albeit in a more subtle manner than in Magical Mystery Tour. Indeed, the cleverness of the story, which pits the Beatles (and/or their alter egos of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band) against the despicable Blue Meanies, is that it is seemingly constructed to be interpretable (to different factions of the audience) on many levels. On one hand, it can be read as a simple, nostalgic children’s/family fantasy tale of the forces of good versus the forces of darkness, and, on the other, as an underground parable of how the psychedelic Beatles (symbols of the peaceful and apolitical forces of hippy counter-culture) overcome the forces of state power to establish a new regime of karmic awareness and universal goodwill. In short, the narrative rewards the audience with the limit of its own experience. It is worth considering this second interpretation in greater detail to assess what, beyond the use of the visual style, the narrative had to offer to the underground.

Firstly, the very title of the film held hidden significance for the flourishing drug culture, since a ‘Yellow Submarine’ (or ‘Yellow Sub’) was also the elaborate title ascribed to a brand of popular narcotic pill for ‘heads’. Although the Beatles have always denied any ‘hidden meanings’ and claimed it to be nothing more than a ‘children's song’,19 it is not unreasonable to question such a simplistic explanation. While their claims would to some degree seem to be consolidated by the use of Starr (the ‘children’s favourite’) as lead vocalist, the identical titles would suggest there is more to the song than meets the ear and, whatever the Beatles’ intentions, there is no denying that the song title had loaded implications for some of the audience. Secondly, the film’s travelogue narrative, which to children and ‘unenlightened’ adults is merely an ‘innocent’ surreal fantasy voyage, is, to underground converts, a simulated hallucinatory ‘trip’ which, developing the themes of Magical Mystery Tour, seems intent on conveying the viewer from one acid-soaked vision of the mind's eye to the next. As the cartoon Beatles repeatedly and knowingly maintain, the world they inhabit is ‘all in the mind’.

Within this world live the wicked Blue Meanies, who can be read as simplistic symbols of the ultimate grassroots manifestation of state power, the police. Like the police, they carry weapons, wear blue uniforms, and use ferocious dogs. Revealingly, they remind Paul of another authority figure, his old English teacher. The heroic Beatles, who with their kindly goodwill and affable humour are presented as the antithesis of these characters, speak a self-referential language which is riddled with sly acknowledgements to their most heavily psychedelic songs, including the then recently banned ‘A Day in the Life’, ‘Fixing a Hole’, and ‘With a Little Help from My Friends’. Indeed, while their dialogue contains drug-oriented references and ‘in’ jokes (‘What day is it?’ ‘Sitarday.’) which could not possibly have had any meaning for a juvenile audience, the chosen soundtrack songs (largely culled from Sergeant Pepper) are also almost always those which possess the largest quota of drug-oriented imagery. Whatever Lennon may have subsequently said about the lyrical content of ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ (and I see no reason to disbelieve the oft-repeated story of his young son’s drawing acting as lyrical inspiration20), there is no doubt that it offers itself to be read as a psychedelic ‘trip’ song, bursting with paranoic tension and sinister metamorphic iconography. Indeed, even the more overtly ‘innocent’ and ‘unenlightened’ non-’Pepper’ soundtrack songs contain lyrics which can be deciphered to suggest double meanings and references to alternative lifestyles. Such is the case in McCartney’s ‘All Together Now’, which, with its lyrical marriage of childlike, nursery rhyme naivety and risque references to promiscuity, creates an ambiguity which could only have been intentional.

The final narrative equilibrium, in which the Beatles' defeat of the Blue Meanies restores the harmonious karmic order of Pepperland, Is also open to an ‘underground’ reading, although not perhaps one which would have been so universally welcomed by its more radical and politicized factions, who, by 1968 and the film's release, were beginning to feel that the group’s ‘flower power’ philosophies of meditation, drugs, love and peace (‘inner’ revolution) were no longer a viable substitute for ‘outward’ protest and occasionally ‘justified’ violent activism.21 Indeed, in many ways the presentation of the Beatles’ spiritual vision of counter-culture Is, for all its Leary-like undertones, essentially closer to the more populist ‘alternative’ doctrines of Christianity or Hinduism (central to different strands of counter-culture during 1967) than to certain transatlantic and European strands of the movement which, since the Tet offensive of February 1968 in Vietnam and the French student uprising (May 1968) were becoming increasingly absorbed into strands of Trotskyism, Maoism and anarchism. While such militant factions would possibly have welcomed the fact that the Beatles, in Yellow Submarine, instigate a symbolic social revolution by establishing a new world order in Pepperland, it is clearly symptomatic of both the film's 1967 genesis and the Beatles' unwillingness to relinquish their advocacy of 1967’s peace-oriented philosophies, that the ‘revolution’ is achieved more through the redemptive consciousness-raising powers of music and nature than by violent retribution. Significantly, the group’s ‘army’ can only ultimately ‘defeat’ the Meanies by changing their ideals, and this is achieved by magically making flowers spring up on to their bodies, literally equating the forces of revolution and change with ‘flower power’.

Indeed, it is tempting to suggest that Yellow Submarine is the cinematic cousin of one of the most famous and enduring images of hippy counter-culture, the photograph of the flower being inserted into the barrel of a gun. At no point in the film do the Beatles take punitive action against the Meanies; they merely want to re-establish the Utopian peace of Pepperland. While a brutal resolution would obviously have been unsuitable for a family audience (and therefore in direct opposition to the film’s populist commercial aspirations), it is clearly salient that the revolution is, to quote MacDonald’s well-chosen book title, ‘in the head’. In essence, then, the underlying message of the film’s climax (that love conquers everything) is not dissimilar to Lennon’s controversial message to disaffected sixties youth, ‘Revolution 1’, recorded for The Beatles faka The White Album) in the month of the film’s release: do not exchange the principles of love and spirituality for violent retribution - real change can only be instigated by the shifting of consciousness.22 In this sense the film perfectly mirrors the holistic ideas which pervaded many of the other, more overtly spiritual and psychedelic songs of the 1967/68 period. Indeed, it is perhaps no coincidence that Lennon’s stirring and sentimental ‘All You Need Is Love’ was later deployed to pad out the soundtrack LP: besides its spiritual themes of anti-materialism, temperance and tolerance, the title itself forms as neat a poetic summation of the film’s ideology as one is likely to find.

Although their involvement in the film was small, Yellow Submarine crystallized the real Beatles vision of counter-culture with a dexterity and accessibility that far surpassed that of Magical Mystery Tour. With the possible exception of the ‘militant’ youth, it really was ‘all-inclusive’ in its attempt to attain cross-cultural appeal, and its projected vision of a Utopian hippydom subtle enough to appeal only to those who searched for or expected it. With its  undertones  of pacifism  and spirituality, it was fundamentally populistic enough to be acceptable to those adults who found the more radical and militant ideals of the underground’s more materialist strands to be objectionable or threatening. Indeed, as Variety wisely noted upon the film’s release, ‘The pic should be a sure click with Beatles’ fans and youthful "pop" audiences and also intrigue those who sometimes tut tut the remarkable combo's more wayout activities.’23

Continued... Yellow Submarine: Part three

© Bob Neaverson 1997 - 2008