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Rating: "Yellow submarine" was a love born by chance, resulting from a channel change, forced but effective, conceived a handful of decades ago. It was then that, captivated by the psychedelic images of this very strange cartoon and intoxicated by those notes so familiar yet never encountered in person before, that I enlisted the Beatles to compose the soundtrack of my life.
In all honesty, seeing those so "strange" drawings, for someone like me who was used to Walt Disney, Hanna-Barbera (limited to Tom & Jerry), and Chuck Jones, I wasn't very pleased to have to watch it, especially since I had been distracted from my favorite and umpteenth fall into the canyon of Wile E. Coyote. I was engulfed in tedium until an old contraption, operated for a particular emergency, began to fly over the background of "Yellow submarine". Like the sirens' song for Ulysses, I was enchanted by that little song I had listened to somewhere without ever bothering to find out who on earth the performers were. And while that little colorful submarine sped among the multicolored mountains of the opening titles, I did everything not to tie myself to a mythical mast in the living room.
At an indefinite time, in Pepperland they live in absolute tranquility. Peace, love, music, and colors would flood every corner of this beautiful world, if not for certain nasty little monsters with boots called "Blue Meanies", intent on making everything gloomy and gray with an army of bizarre characters. Their surprise attack will throw Pepperland into panic, and only the daredevil intervention of Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, rounded up by an old sailor, will manage to solve the situation.
The images, compiled by Heinz Edelmann based on a script by Lee Minoff, are imbued with creativity innovative for the time, phosphorescent colors, multicolored alchemies, skillful fusions of graphic effects really difficult to imagine or describe. Considering that in 1968 digital was something meant for finger pressing and 3D could have been the abbreviation of a pop-art exercise, it is not hard to define the film's animation style as "amazing" and avant-garde. The screenplay, quite simple, is based on playful jokes, simple Lennon-like nonsense, and dialogues pertinent to the film's structure, entertaining and comprehensible for young viewers and others. Ralph Bakshi, a few years later, will draw heavily from these graphic sources.
Touching is the sequence accompanied by "Eleanor Rigby", amusing the sequences of Ringo saved by the cavalry in the "Sea of Monsters", or the encounter with the physicist, polyglot, botanist, satirist, pianist, and dentist Jeremy. And Glove? The terrible glove? Psychedelic the dancing Amazon of "Lucy in the sky with diamonds", glittering, acoustic that of "Only a northern song", and disorienting the sequence of the "Sea of Holes", as well as cute and curious the one in which, to the notes of "When I'm sixty-four", the Beatles, projected into the Sea of Time, demonstrate how long a single, banal minute can be.
The "Fab Four" appear in flesh and blood at the end, singing the very charming "All together now" and showing the souvenirs of this wonderful adventure. Besides the songs, noteworthy are the musical scores composed by George Martin, skillfully adapted to the freshness and sparkling magic of that wonderful yellow submarine that will sail forever in everyone's hearts.
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