Art: NEW MAGIC IN ANIMATION

TO hear artists tell it, art these days is almost anything that strikes the eye. Framed empty space, neon bulbs, rooms with booming loudspeakers, a deliberately ill-tuned radio set—all qualify. But one kind of art that has been around quite a while has been all but ignored—animated film. Though now sophisticated in its techniques and clearly unlimited in its subject range, animation as an art form has been largely confined to exercises in television commercials, kiddie cartoons, and a few arty shorts that are of the kind that are only noticed at film festivals.

That was before Yellow Submarine. Ostensibly a movie about the Beatles, Submarine in reality is an 87-minute melange of arty art work and allusory sight gags, which has turned into a smash hit, delighting adolescents and esthetes alike. Currently, it is second only to Funny Girl at the box office.

Yellow Submarine combines every trick and treat of film animation with a dazzle of takeoffs on schools and styles of art. Picassoesque monsters compete with gentle grotesques from Dr. Seussland. Graham Sutherlandish plants burst in and out of bloom.

Plump Edwardians wander with suave decadence out of Aubrey Beardsley’s world, and creatures consume them selves with Steinbergian detachment. There are silk screens from Warholville and numbers from Indiana. Psychedelia explodes and art nouveau swirls in the most unexpected places. Corridor doors are open on surrealist nightmares, Freudian symbolisms and early movies—all combined in a swiveting, swirling splurge of phantasmagoria, puns, pastiches and visual non sequiturs.

Lost Allegory. Yellow Submarine has set sail under somewhat false pretenses. For one thing, most of its advertising gives the impression that the Beatles made it, though almost their only contribution consists of excerpts from their records, plus three new and not notable songs. Secondly, the credits state that it is based on John Lennon’s and Paul McCartney’s song by the same name, but the story line of the film has very little in common with that simplistic little allegory about goofing off on barbiturate capsules (“yellow submarines”).

The plot, in fact, is minimal. A pleasant place called Pepperland is invaded by a tribe of amorphous music-hating monsters called the Blue Meanies, who launch a devastating attack with “splotch guns,” which drain their victims of color, and a ferocious Flying Glove, with jet propulsion and a sinister intelligence of its own. The Meanies’ ranks fight the Apple Bonkers (who drop big green apples on people’s heads) and the Snapping Turtle Turks with sharks’ mouths for stomachs.

One Pepperlander manages to escape. White-mustachioed Old Fred climbs into the Yellow submarine (which is inexplicably parked on the summit of an Aztec pyramid) and takes off to bring somebody—anybody—to help. He ends up in Liverpool and finds the Beatles. After a voyage through some indeterminate fantasy land of Outer Space or Sea Bottom, inhabited by terrors, demons and malevolent monsters, they make it back to Pepperland and vanquish the Meanies with Beatlemusic and LOVE.

It is the getting there that is all the fun. Bits and pieces of Beatle classics become wildly improbable visualizations. Eleanor Rigby’s “lonely people” are trapped in telephone booths or seen pathetically befriending stray cats against the grimy bleakness of halftone photographs of Liverpool itself. Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds suddenly and inexplicably appears as a girl on a carrousel horse, surrounded not by diamonds but dancers from old movie musicals. When I’m 64 becomes a trip through the Sea of Time, where clocks race forward and backward and the Beatles sprout suffocating white beards. And the Yellow Submarine itself is a far cry from the friendly houseboat of the song; it is a jam-crammed maze of machinery, levers, toggles and buttons that visually mocks every science-fiction film ever made.

Monsters and Hamburgers. The perils they encounter would have delighted Edward Lear. There are the Kinky Boot Beasts, the Punching Bag Monster, the Cocktail Party Giggle Monster and the Running Indian Monster—who takes flight when the sub providentially disgorges a troop of U.S. cavalry. The voracious Vacuum Flask Monster inhales everything in sight—including the submarine. Eventually he makes the mistake of sucking up his own tail, swallows himself and disappears, thereby liberating the heroes to continue their voyage. They do so only to founder in the op-tight Sea of Holes. In a joke more pop than op, Ringo leads Old Fred through a Claes Oldenburg assemblage of gigantic hamburgers, Coke bottles and oversized fruit. Explains Ringo: “It’s my friends’ display—they’re just displaying around.”

The whole surrealistic mix of pictures, words, songs and images is the result of two years of bickering and brain-storming by an international collection of diverse talents. In the beginning was Al Brodax, head of the Television and Motion Pictures Division of King Features Syndicate. For the past decade, Brodax has produced over 500 animated shorts for TV on King Features properties. One of his subjects was the Beatles, and somehow he started thinking about them in conjunction with Walt Disney’s 1940 feature, Fantasia—a landmark in the development of animation. Why not a feature-length animated film on a Beatles theme?

Hitler as Model. With a green light from the Beatles, Brodax went to work with a Czech-born commercial artist named Heinz Edelmann, whose work he had noticed in a German magazine. Edelmann proved to have an antic visual imagination that provides Submarine with its distinctive character. Edelmann drew the characters and most of the backgrounds.

His sketches were then turned over to a roster of 40 animators and 140 technical artists, who made some 500,000 drawings altogether. This is considerably less art work than was used by Walt Disney, whose techniques were developed to simulate the motions of real life. Animators like John Hubley rebelled against Disney’s sleek realism. They produced films that frankly displayed their characters as drawings, not people. Backgrounds were not landscapes, but sketches. The results were such creations as Gerald McBoing Doing and Mr. Magoo. Candidly stylized, outrageously unrealistic, they made a kind of claim to be art. Edelmann and Submarine obviously belong to this tradition rather than Disney’s. He chooses to seize attitudes rather than to simulate motion. His characters strut, jerk and visually stutter across landscapes that never were. The result is unreal and enormously evocative.

Edelmann took considerable trouble with his principal characters—studying the Beatles’ film, A Hard Day’s Night, to get their characteristic walks, and watching an old newsreel of Hitler as a model for some of the movements of the Chief Blue Meanie. Edelmann’s out right inventions came from everywhere —including the unconscious. He thinks he may have got the idea of the shark-stomached Snapping Turtle Turks because of a Turk he knew who once forced an indigestible Turkish meal on him. He considers the Flying Glove an apt symbol of evil, since “gloves are worn by criminals and therefore stand for action in a secret, malevolent way.” He feels that his inclusion of the mechanical soccer players in the Eleanor Rigby sequence was inspired by his loathing of the game at which his father used to be a star.

Most of the images have less darkling origins. The Sea of Holes (“Or is it the Holy See?” quips John Lennon) was originally intended to go with the Beatle song, Fixing a Hole, which was later dropped from the sound track. It obviously reflects a conscious or subconscious memory of episodes in the movie 2001. The cotton-tailed, clown-faced Nowhere Man is a satire on intellectuals (“So little time, so much to know”).

Style or Nothing. Looking at the work in progress, Ringo complained that the pictures of him made his nose too short, and it was promptly lengthened. But likeness was never really the point of Submarine. It is style or nothing. If the result seems less a coherent story than a two-hour pot high, Submarine is still a breakthrough combination of the feature film and art’s intimacy with the unconscious.

Is it art? Well, probably not in the sense that Matthew Arnold demanded of “high seriousness.” It certainly cannot be hung on a wall or stood in an alcove. But it is gay, handsome, inventive, and it is at least as much fun to look at as most of the work in contemporary galleries. As for its authors, they are inspired by their own success. Edelmann is now thinking about animating J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, with its enchanted landscapes, gnomes and elves. “Animation is an extension of painting, because it adds the element of time,” he says. “The future of animation is as limitless as the imagination.”