Yellow Submarine

This animated feature has the Beatles on an odyssey to Pepperland, ‘18000 leagues beneath the sea’, to take on the music-hating Blue Meanies. Pepperland was a paradise until the “Meanies” moved in and everyone had given up hope. Until the Beatles arrived in their yellow submarine to save the day. It is a fascinating but uneven anthology of contemporary art and graphic design up to the late sixties - surrealism, art nouveau, op and pop art - brought together by designer Edelman’s flattened comic strip, Lennon style whimsy out of Lear and Carroll and play upon the Beatles’ myth. Stand-out sequences include ‘Sergeant Pepperland’, the Borowczyk-style Liverpool sequence, ‘Eleanor Rigby’ with Charles Jenkins’ special effects, ‘Nowhere Man’ and Dunning’s rotoscoped ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’. Voices: John Clive, Geoffrey Hughes, Peter Batten, Paul Angelis, Dick Emery, Lance Percival.