An Analysis of George Dunning’s Yellow Submarine
Based on the music of the British pop band The Beatles, Yellow Submarine (George Dunning, 1968) is a film that perhaps best resembles the tradition of the jukebox musical. It tells the story of Pepperland, a music-loving utopia falling under siege by the music-hating Blue Meanies. By command of the Mayor, Captain Fred boards the titular yellow submarine to seek help. He discovers The Beatles and urges their help given their musical talents and their resemblance to Pepperland’s favourite musical group: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The Beatles join Old Fred (Fig. 1) on a journey back to Pepperland, and rally Pepperland’s citizens to rebel against the Blue Meanies. Harnessing the groovy power of psychedelic pop, they sing their way to freedom. Yet while the film made an unmistakable impact on the animation world thanks to its magical mystery tour through psychedelic British animation of the 1960s, far less is known about the story behind its creation. In this blog post, I will be analysing the extent to which the production contexts surrounding Yellow Submarine impacted the animation techniques used in its making, and determining the influence upon both its unusual narrative structure, and the shape of its surrealist aesthetics.
Fig. 1 - Old Fred in Yellow Submarine (George Dunning, 1968).
The U.S. and U.K. creative teams behind Yellow Submarine were provided with an incredibly small budget and an impossibly tight deadline to realise the animated world of Pepperland and its inhabitants, which resulted in the use of various animation techniques at the time uncommon in commercial animation. Yellow Submarine was produced with a budget of less than one million USD (250,000 GBP), “…about a quarter of what a well-planned and regulated animation feature would cost” (Hieronimus 2002, 33). Additionally, because Yellow Submarine came about from a contractual obligation that the Beatles had to fulfil, its own success hinged on the band’s popularity. Yet there were signs that the band would soon split, and thus, the film had a predetermined premiere date that left the production team only 11 months to complete the entire film, a third of the standard Disney production schedule of roughly three years (Brown 2023, 11). Considering the budget and limited working time, the fluid, Disney-style animation that most audiences were accustomed to was beyond the filmmakers’ resources (Brown 2023, 11). This meant they had to resort to more experimental techniques and creative approaches that would allow them to produce a feature-length animation in a third of the standard production time and at a quarter of the cost. Director George Dunning came well equipped for this task as he had previously worked with experimental animation pioneer Norman McLaren at the National Film Board of Canada (Hieronimus 2002, 159). The combination of Dunning’s experimental background and art director Heinz Edelmann’s vision for a medley of visual styles led to the inclusion of multiple animation techniques such as rotoscoping, which blended animation with live-action footage, photographs, and paintings, to offer a creative take on ‘limited animation.’
Fig. 2 - Yellow Submarine’s ‘Eleanor Rigby’ sequence.
Special effects animator Charlie Jenkins was the man behind most of Yellow Submarine’s more technically experimental scenes, known for combining cel animation with live-action footage, a technique most evidently seen in the sequence for “Eleanor Rigby.” This scene follows Captain Fred on the yellow submarine traversing the streets of Liverpool in search for help (Fig. 2). The streets and buildings are designed using altered photographs, and the people Fred passes are animated by looping edited live-action footage of the films’ many contributors in sync with the music. The yellow submarine itself is animated through a form of limited animation, as only one still frame of the submarine is moved across the screen or scaled to indicate movement with depth. This technique not only adds to a contrast between the real world and Pepperland – the latter being much more vibrant and quite literally more animated than the former – but also makes a scene like this possible. While Jenkins’ technique was still relatively time consuming and difficult to pull off, a scene of this scope would not have been feasible for the film’s production crew to achieve through traditional cel animation with the allotted time and budget.
Yellow Submarine’s unique narrative can be largely attributed to the animation team being forced to work without a completed script for several months after production had started. The initial script for the film, written by Lee Minoff, was almost immediately discarded by Dunning after the project was picked up as it did not fit his initial vision (Hieronimus 2002, 34). Any semblance of a script that followed would undergo “…innumerable [revisions] and new scripts [would be] commissioned…” (Hieronimus 2002, 110). This meant, essentially, that the crew had to create and begin an animated film without a script. The one thing that was certain was the soundtrack. It was known that they would feature several songs the Beatles had already released and four written specifically for the movie (The Beatles VH1 Special, 1999). Many of the film’s animators recall some musical sequences being among the first scenes they worked on when production began, like “All You Need is Love” and “Nowhere Man,” in addition to scenes that lacked a need for lip-synced dialogue like the Sea of Monsters (Hieronimus 2002, 145). The resulting sequences for these scenes would eventually be strung together and “to a large measure, [they] shaped the action of the plot” (Hieronimus 2002, 16). In coming up with material to connect the eleven musical numbers to each other, “the filmmakers conceived of a loose good vs. evil fantasy storyline in which the [Beatles] must overcome the […] Blue Meanies” (Brown 2023, 8). As Yellow Submarine’s plot was built piecemeal between completed animated sequences and musical numbers without much guidance from a script, the narrative developed a whimsical, nearly improvisational feel that again lends itself to the surrealistic tone developed throughout the film.
Fig. 3 - The flattened style of Yellow Submarine.
The animators and creatives behind Yellow Submarine were well aware of what defined mainstream animation and, against the terms of its production, made conscious efforts to deviate from it through their designs. Audiences of the late 1960s were accustomed to cartoons from Disney, Hanna-Barbera, and UPA, with recent feature film releases including Disney’s Jungle Book (1967) and Sword in the Stone (1963). The film’s producer Al Brodax claims “it was unanimously agreed to seek out an art form […] as far removed from Disney as possible” (qtd. in Brown 2023, 11). Edelmann elaborates further that “to many people animation was Disney. What we did was not sensationally new, […] What we did was bring it to a commercial feature project” (Hieronimus 2002, 48). Edelmann created caricatures of the Beatles’ public image, giving them exaggerated proportions with large hands and feet, elongated legs, shorter torsos, and tight facial features. Such flat, two-dimensional styles differed from Disney’s more hyper-realistically proportioned characters (Fig. 3). The Beatles also had a strong association with the counterculture movement of the 1960s, which gained traction in response to the ongoing Vietnam War, rejected authority and societal conventions, and advocated for love and peace. Edelmann wanted to capture this sensation in the film’s feel; as a whole it was designed not to just be a “movie,” but to be an “experience” (Hieronimus 2002, 164). This intent is best captured in the design of Pepperland and its inhabitants. The rolling hills and foliage are painted a range of rich greens and yellows, psychedelic flowers bloom in vivid colours, positive words like “love,” “yes,” and “ok” are scattered across the landscape, and Pepperland’s citizens freely express themselves with all sorts of eccentric, brightly-coloured and patterned fashions. Edelmann’s design decisions for Yellow Submarine were evidently fuelled not only by a need to divert from commercial animation aesthetic but to divert from the social and cultural mainstream of the time as well.
There is no question that the story behind Yellow Submarine’s creation is one of a small team of dedicated artists overcoming unbelievable financial pressures, time constraints, and mainstream demands to create an incredible work of art. The impact that Yellow Submarine’s tumultuous production had on the final film is undeniable, serving to fuel the resourcefulness and creativity that would be what made Yellow Submarine a revolutionary piece of animation, one that brought experimental animation techniques, unconventional narratives, and playful design beyond independent animation and into the commercial sphere.
**Article published: July 19, 2024**
References
Brown, Noel. 2023. “‘All Together Now’: ‘Yellow Submarine’ (1968), The Beatles, and Children’s Film.” Kwartalnik Filmowy, no. 121 (April) : 6–33.
Hieronimus, Robert. 2002. Inside the Yellow Submarine: The Making of The Beatles' Animated Classic. Wisconsin: Krause Publications.
“The Beatles VH1 Special Yellow Submarine Interviews Paul, George and Ringo 9/19/99.” YouTube (posted February 2012), available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECpUhX9wKlM&ab_channel=vitorbastos123.
Biography
Kirstin Stevens Schmidt is a graduating student at the University of Texas at Dallas, Harry W. Bass Jr. School of Arts, Humanities, and Technology with a concentration in Animation. She focuses on blending her passions for sculpture, traditional art, and animation through stop motion and experimental techniques. Earlier versions of this text were developed with the help of Dr. Christine Veras and peers from the Animation Studies course.