![]() ![]() Some armchair historians pinpoint the horrors of Vietnam as the last gasp of American morality in the 20th century, but in the Beatles’ Elysian strawberry fields, the winning formula of friendship, positivity, and the power of music could still be enough. The fantastical story of the Pepperlanders and the Blue Meanie menace is resistance cinema in the truest sense, albeit in a register so idealistic it barges past the point of naïveté. While the first act includes a canny artist’s rendering of a dreary industrial London, Yellow Submarine drifts along with the currents of a Vietnam-era United States in which the hippies were finally pushing back against the jackbooted status quo. ![]() More than their own celebrity archetypes, the Beatles bore the weight of their time, both responding to and dictating the course of the flower children’s peace-and-love zeitgeist. We meet hapless everyman Ringo kicking a can and muttering “woe is me” in a trash-strewn alley, tormented artiste John is a Frankenstein’s monster who must drink a potion to become human, sitar glissandos announce the arrival of zen philosopher George as he meditates in the wind, and pretty boy Paul pops out of a doorway to the sound of raucous applause, catching a tossed bouquet of flowers without even looking. The script for the 1968 feature, now celebrating its 50th anniversary with a restoration and rerelease into theaters, is well aware of this, introducing each member of the band in a setting that plays to their popular myth. That’s all no matter - the Beatles always had more utility as concepts than people, as repositories for our ideas and feelings and memories about them. One afternoon of riffing in a studio would be sufficient to get them off the hook, and then the increasingly divided men would be free to go their separate ways. After the production process on the Help! film left the Beatles with a bad taste in their mouths, they figured the most hassle-free way to fulfill their contract for another picture with United Artists would be a cartoon that they could mostly sit out. The Fab Four make a cameo appearance as their live-action selves to do some light prop comedy and cue up the final sing-along of multilingual toe-tapper “All Together Now,” but for the animated majority of the run time, their two-dimensional avatars are voiced by actors doing extremely convincing impressions of the legends from Liverpool. ![]() Excepting five minutes near the tail end of the film, the Beatles are nowhere to be found in The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |