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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.