When we hear happy music, it’s almost always in a major key. Typically, animated films jump from the screen right at you, like they’re trying to give you a big coloristic hug to pull you in, but everything here is slightly washed out. "Yellow Submarine" opens with a borderline-disconsolate Ringo Starr wandering the streets of Liverpool, bemoaning that nothing ever happens to him. It enervates us, makes us more alone, compromises the quality of the alone time we have, which becomes given over to despair, fretting about all of the things we are not, rather than looking inward, assessing what we see, what we are fortunate to have and be able to grow, so that we can grow. We put a lot of effort into pretending to be happy, these days more than ever, thinking that the people around us, and on social media, who wage one-person campaigns to fete their own happiness, are actually happy, and that we need to keep up. For the central theme of "Yellow Submarine," the core vibe - and one that is celebrated, even - is its melancholia. What I love best about "Yellow Submarine" is that it has nothing to do with that kind of “rah rah! Go Beatles!” ardor that was a staple of the attempts to market them, which is what pop films were at the time, these exercises in spreading the word about a band or singer, even if they didn’t need it (for example, the Elvis films). The truth was, the Beatles were busy making "The Beatles" - aka, that aforementioned White Album - and had zero belief that a film of them in cartoon form would mean anything of any artistic merit. Then I came to 1965’s "Help!," a hugger-mugger blend of James Bondian tropes, with a somber air, as with the recording studio sequence, in that smoky half-light, when the band run through “You’re Gonna Lose that Girl,” one of those songs of theirs that made the subjunctive into a matchless form of person-to-person musical potency.īut then there is "Yellow Submarine," which the Beatles had next to nothing to do with, save gathering themselves together-in non-animated form - to shoot a short scene in a theatre as a cheeky coda. It was, in some ways, my first and greatest rock and roll moment.
#Yellow submarine cartoon glove becomes love tv
You watch that scene where the band busts out of the TV studio, hightailing it down that fire escape, as “Can’t Buy Me Love” absolutely cranks on the sound system, and you have a new notion of what freedom means. My own Beatles viewing history began with "A Hard Day’s Night," which gave a pre-sexual teenager a hit of euphoria and possibility that bordered on a kind of emotional and spiritual orgasm. You can watch it on Blu-ray, of course, but that’s not quite the same.
#Yellow submarine cartoon glove becomes love movie
"Yellow Submarine" rarely screens in theaters, as a print just has not been made available for movie house circulation in some time. But what particularly interests me is when there is a Beatles-based work of art that holds as much appeal - maybe even more appeal - for people who could not give a single chorus of “Yeah yeah yeah” about the boys from Liverpool.Īnd so we come to another work from 1968, the animated film "Yellow Submarine," which is also coming to theaters here in July.
A lot of Beatles fans espouse being part of that community, where it’s also fun to like something that others like, which can make for a kind of bonding across generations, continents, world views. Dare to write something that evinces any criticism of the art of their heroes, and the brickbats are coming your way. Beatles people, even for how voluminous their number is, can be clannish. Dusting off a rarely heard, seen, or read treasure of yore is always bound to send Beatles people into a tizzy, as will be the case come the fall with the release of a vastly expanded version of 1968’s White Album.
0 kommentar(er)
