Yellow Submarine (1968)
Directed by George Dunning
The wicked Blue Meanies take over Pepperland, eliminating all color and music. As the only survivor, the Lord Admiral escapes in the yellow submarine and journeys to Liverpool to enlist the help of the Beatles.
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What critics compared Yellow Submarine to
No “Yellow Submarine,” no “Day Tripper,” no “Eleanor Rigby.”
Working with cinematographer Christopher Ross, the screen pops and is brought to life in a similar fashion as Yellow Submarine.
A survey of the greatest hits, it forgets what has made those hits so great despite cheeky references to Yellow Submarine and A Hard Day’s Night .
It’s difficult to get too bent out of shape about reality while you’re humming “Yellow Submarine” or “Strawberry Fields.”
To know that, all you have to do is see the title sequence of “A Hard Day’s Night,” which electrifies you from its opening THRUM!!! , or (in the same film) the Beatles blasting the sonic bliss of “I Should Have Known Better” from inside a train storage compartment, or the sublime melting psychedelia of the “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” flying-damsel fantasia from “Yellow Submarine,” or Paul gazing into the camera as he delivers the hymn-like rapture of the title song from “Let It Be.”
While underwater, she is under the watchful eye of her wizard father, Fujimoto (Liam Neeson), an oceanic impresario who sports striped suits and flowing hair and looks like something out of The Beatles' Yellow Submarine.
Miyazaki's vision of life under the sea is closer to the Pop Art of Yellow Submarine than to the photorealistic luminescence of Finding Nemo.
The early scenes recall Peter Max’s Yellow Submarine, with the father in a blue candy-striped jacket and flowing hair, a kind of undersea ringmaster.
While the story may be inspired by The Little Mermaid, the visuals look more like something out of The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine with its extremely bright color palette and almost play doh-like way of movement (the scene of Ponyo chasing Sosuke while riding on a series of fish-shaped tidal waves might be the most stunningly fluid piece of animation Miyazaki and his team of animators have ever accomplished).
Miyazaki pulls you into a world of pure imagination that seems, by turns, inspired by images from Maurice Sendak, Winsor McCay and the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine.”
Poppy and Branch sally forth on a rescue mission, heading into the Bergen homeland (Bergen County?) with several breaks to sing, sometimes with freaky hallucinogenic backdrops that would not have been out of place in “Yellow Submarine.”
As you'd expect under these circumstances, there are good things mixed in with the syrup, including a psychedelic underworld of monsters out of Yellow Submarine; Zooey Deschanel making a lovelorn scullery maid sound like a meek, ditzy Californian teenager; and John Cleese as the Bergen king informing his son (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) that "you will never, ever be happy".
** If 1968’s “Yellow Submarine” introduced Pop Art and psychedelic rock-poster surrealism into the cartoon feature film, then this latest DreamWorks Animation release — with its Glow Stick chemiluminescence, its anime mutant cuteness and its “cupcakes and rainbows” color scheme — finds visual inspiration in the upper echelons of Katy Perryesque high-gloss pop and in the rave scene associated with electronic dance music.
The scene where Bower (his face covered so they can’t see his nose, I guess) makes his way across a roomful of snoozing mutants is startlingly like the cartoon Beatles tiptoeing through the sleeping Blue Meanies in Yellow Submarine (1968).
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The whole movie has a mercurial, mood-hopping free-form vibe that, at its best, suggests Disney with a touch of “Yellow Submarine.”
And I suppose there’s a little Zardoz in The Fountain — along with some of Kubrick’s 2001 (1968), Ken Russell’s Altered States (1980), Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972) and perhaps even a smattering of George Dunning’s Yellow Submarine (1968).
Of more recent vintage, its closest relative was the “Yellow Submarine”, another animated feature that was filled with visual puns and madcap logic.
Many had written it off after Disney parted ways with the medium's biggest champion, Robert Zemeckis, and scrapped his "Yellow Submarine" remake idea.
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Pompous with pregnant implications, mean in story, and exhausting rather than exhilarating in technique, the interior and afterlife journey is not a patch on Fantastic Voyage, Yellow Submarine, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Performance , Altered States, Tron, Strange Days and a long et cetera.
I imagine it’s akin to seeing a creative brouhaha like Yellow Submarine new – before CGI ripped manual skill from a boy and his camera.