(3 of 3)
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."