That level of remove between band and film, ironically, allowed the band's ethos to be rendered in a truer sense than it might otherwise have been. So it fell to screenwriter Lee Minoff to do what the Beatles themselves were so good at: taking someone else's nascent idea and blowing it up into something sublime. But while the title song might have seemed tailor-made for a movie adaptation, an adaptation apparently wasn't what Lennon and McCartney had in mind when they penned it. The music, of course, is what makes it a Beatles film in the most obvious sense. It becomes something imagistic and harrowing, and makes you want sail away in the next available floating sub just like cartoon Ringo does. No fade outs.) Against those dolorous, washed out grays-that look grayer than ever in high-def-"Eleanor Rigby" becomes more than a cut on what may well be the best album ever made. (You always get the complete song in Yellow Submarine. To underscore that duality, "Eleanor Rigby" starts playing on the soundtrack, and we get the complete song. Think "Strawberry Fields Forever." But that personal element has universal ramifications at the same time, like we're all wandering around those Liverpool streets, looking for meaning. ![]() When our titular submersible sails away from the under-siege Pepperland in search of help and comes to the gray husk of Liverpool, where a depressed Ringo wanders the streets, there's a level of intimacy, of looking in on someone else's life, that you get in the best Beatles songs. Rather than as a tossed-off merchandising play or as a curious relic of the '60s, it should be remembered as the most emblematically Beatle-y of all Beatles films, encapsulating everything good and lasting about the band: their ability to fuse the personal and universal, their penchant for elevating borrowed ideas, and the human empathy powering everything they recorded. It fell to screenwriter Lee Minoff to do what the Beatles themselves were so good at: taking someone else's idea and blowing it up into something sublime.īut with Yellow Submarine being restored for this week's Blu-ray release, it's worth reappraising its place in the Beatles canon. The kiddies could love it, the stoners could love it, and everyone else could watch in bemusement as the actor-voiced Beatles fought to save Pepperland from the evil Blue Meanies, cuddly monsters whose esteem for negativity was so great that they forbade the use of the word "yes." Throw in trippy imagery, a childlike title tune, a protean if vague message-basically, Love Rocks, Music Rocks, hooray for Love and Music-and you had what amounted to a counterculture Fantasia. Instead, Submarine has lived on largely as a politely respected souvenir of the Peace-and-Love era. ![]() In the pantheon of Beatles movies, 1968's animated Yellow Submarine often gets thought of as barely one at all: The Beatles themselves weren't even in it save for a hammy, half-hearted spot at the end. Yellow Submarine, which is being re-released this week, encapsulates the band's ethos better than any of their other movies-even though Fab Four were played by voice actors.
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