Cinema: Bad Trip

Full-length cartoon features have been based on novels (Gulliver’s Travels), fairy tales (Snow White), even classical music (Fantasia). Yellow Submarine may be the first to be based on a song. Recorded in 1966, the Beatles’ jaunty single was jolly good nonsense that even a tune-deaf kid could sing. It was also a sly euphemism for a drug-inspired freak-out. The movie ends up as a curious case of artistic schizophrenia. The score includes several hits by the Beatles and just as many misses. The plot and the animation seem too square for hippies and too hip for squares. Children, as usual, are caught between.

One morning in Liverpool, George, John, Paul and Ringo are approached by a troubled man in a canary-colored boat. His country, he announces, is in the hands of the Blue Meanies. The boys hop aboard and eventually arrive at Pepperland, where they conquer the villains—who look like angry Rorschach blots—with that worn weapon LOVE.

In search of a visual mode for its subject, West German animator Heinz Edelmann furiously ransacks the past. From the mannerists, he borrows “shot colors” —red blending into orange, blue fading into green. He employs the whiplash and the curvilinear strokes of art nouveau. He features the upholstered monsters of comic strips, the impudent whimsy of Dada, the vibrating poster art of Peter Max. The eclecticism almost becomes a style of its own, and occasionally it is effective, as in Eleanor Rigby when “all the lonely people” appear as gritty newsreel figures who float by each other in a surrealistic frieze.

The script beneath the pictures reads like one of John Lennon’s semiliterate Joycean pastiches. Flabby punjabs pass for wit (“Are you bluish? You don’t look bluish”), and the boys’ voyage is filled with stilted symbolism. In one scene, the quartet passes by the Sea of Phrenology, where huge heads of Moses, Cicero, Freud and Einstein loom; John recalls that a fellow named Ulysses also went on a journey. Ultimately, however, what is wrong with the film is the Beatles. They are not in it. Except for the songs and a final sequence in which they appear live in some drab sing-along footage, they had nothing to do with Yellow Submarine. All but the most confirmed Beatlemaniacs can profit by their example.