Pop's culture

Yellow Submarine still holds water

by Peter Keough

YELLOW SUBMARINE, Directed by George Dunning. Written by Lee Minoff, Al Brodax, Jack Mendelsohn, and Erich Segal, based on the song by John Lennon and Paul McCartney. With the voices of John Clive, Geoffrey Hughes, Paul Angelis, Peter Batten, and Lance Percival. An MGM/UA release. At the Brattle Theatre, September 3 through 12.

It's not just your father's pop tune. Three decades later, the Beatles' "Yellow Submarine" remains insidiously catchy. Succeeding generations of grade-schoolers have earnestly sung it in music classes, and everyone who's heard it has a permanent disc spinning perpetually in his or her head. Is it the wistful, simple-minded inevitability of the melody, the melancholy reassurance of the lyrics? "And your friends/Are all aboard/Many more of them/Live next door." Part whimsical return to the womb, part solipsistic nightmare, and part sneaky reference to an illegal drug with the same name, "Yellow Submarine" was the '60s at its bubblegum best.

The animated film it inspired holds up almost as well. Never really a Beatles movie like A Hard Day's Night or Help! -- their only contribution being the 10 songs on the soundtrack and a brief live appearance at the end, with the voices of their animated personae dubbed by actors -- it managed in its ersatz way to capture not only something of the group's spirit but something of the era as well. Gaudy, cheeky, eclectic in style and flippant in content, it alternates feckless innocence with hip irony. Watching it again, you might almost feel that this self-contained golden bubble of youth, optimism, irreverence, and imagination has sailed unscathed through the Sea of Time.

Not entirely, though. Yellow Submarine can seem more lava lamp than movie; with Love Story's Erich Segal one of the credited screenwriters and Peter Max one of its visual influences, it's a reminder that the '60s had its own brand of kitsch and treacle. The roughest sailing takes place in Pepperland, "an unearthly paradise," notes a voiceover narrator in the film's prologue, presided over by the eponymous sergeant's Lonely Hearts Club Band and populated by vacuous hippie wallpaper.

Thank goodness the mordantly clever Blue Meanies arrive to stomp out every last rainbow and butterfly and drain the schmaltzy Shangri-La of its Day-Glo colors. The Meanies show the film's designer, Heinz Edelmann, at his surreal best: "Snapping Turks" with fezzed microcephalic heads and toothy jaws in their bulging bellies; a giant flying blue glove; and, most ominous, the "Apple Bonkers," Giacometti-like giants in top hats armed with green fruit identical to the corporate logo of the Beatles' ill-destined Apple Corps.

The Meanies' nemesis is music, and so Fred (Lance Percival), the sole surviving Pepperlander, flees to London in the title submersible. There he rounds up John (John Clive), Paul (Geoffrey Hughes), George (Paul Angelis), and Ringo (Peter Batten) and after a treacherous and daftly illustrated voyage returns with them to battle the foe.

The story is a slight variation on '60s anti-establishment stereotypes, though the Apple Bonkers suggest the filmmakers were cynically aware that the Blue Meanies are more within than without. As with most musicals, though, the plot is just a frame for the production numbers, which are still fresh and inventive despite years of MTV. In imagery they draw deftly on contemporary pop and op art, underground comics, and the surrealist tradition of Magritte and de Chirico, and they prefigure Terry Gilliam's work with Monty Python, not to mention Sesame Street. The best sequences are the most irrelevant, including a chilling "Eleanor Rigby" illustrated with images of repetitive London bleakness, a brash and suitably minimalistic "Nowhere Man" (starring the blue-faced, pedantic, and rather tiresome Jeremy Hillary Boo, who overstays his welcome), and a rhapsodic "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" that features the luminous line animation of Astaire/Rogers-like dancing figures.

As for the faux Beatles themselves, they are one-note reprises of the characterizations from the two previous movies -- pert and superficial Paul, cryptic George ("It's all in your mind," etc.), sardonic John, and sentimental Ringo. Their low-key banter, though, well suits Submarine's side journeys to such Lewis Carroll lands as the Sea of Holes and the Sea of Time. There, Einsteinian paradoxes posit a universe that's a safe, psychedelic playground where everything is possible and everyone is cheerfully insane. Meanwhile, the real Beatles were off in India meditating and plotting ways of undoing themselves and one another, and the world rolled on regardless. As we sail on this vessel one more time, the sentiment "All You Need Is Love" still seems more than just a Northern song.