Word: cartoonable
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Full-length cartoon features have been based on novels (Gulliver's Travels), fairy tales (Snow White), even classical music (Fantasia). Yellow Submarine may be the first to be based on a song. Recorded in 1966, the Beatles' jaunty single was jolly good nonsense that even a tune-deaf kid could sing. It was also a sly euphemism for a drug-inspired freak-out. The movie ends up as a curious case of artistic schizophrenia. The score includes several hits by the Beatles and just as many misses. The plot and the animation seem too square for hippies...
...same time, a compromise had to be reached since the stark backgrounds and limited movement of UPA or Hanna-Barbera (Yogi Bear) lack power and potential for complete realization of its creator's imaginative ideas. A strange animal resulted: stylistic form is almost non-existent, the movement of the cartoon figures is executed competently but no better, editing is largely unoriginal, and Edelmann's drawings--the frame content--consequently become everything...
HERE YOU have to give Edelmann points: the subtle coloring works consistently well, and most of the malevolents (Blue Meanies and denizens of the Sea of Monsters) are top-notch cartoon creations. An evil-grinning feline called a Butterfly Stomper provides a hysterical 30 seconds of irrelevant wickedness; a flying glove proves a wonderfully Kafkasque weapon, and an anteater-cum-dinosaur happily devours everything in sight (including the frame background) by drawing it into his vacuum-cleaner snout. "So long, sucker," yells a Beatle as they escape. Nonetheless, the eclecticism of Edelmann's drawings disturbs as much as it captivates...
Sharing one of Disney's weaker traits, the Beatle cartoon shows a depressing proclivity toward the literal. The scriptwriters' labored commentary is too often illustrated by the artist-animator, rarely complemented; most irritating, some of the Beatles' best songs are taken completely at face value rather than interpreted. Thus, Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds is accompanied by diamond-studded women standing on stars, Eleanor Rigby juxtaposed with silkscreened photographs of lonely people. Paradoxically, Yellow Submarine's best moments come during the literal Lucy In The Sky number, when Edelmann treats his audience to contour line drawings filled with rapidly...
...what you think of Yellow Submarine ultimately depends on how you like your Beatles served up. A Hard Day's Night and Help! succeeded in part because of Richard Lester's careful, if striking, contrasts between the Beatles, the world, and the dramatic action of the plot. The cartoon Beatles--their voices strangely unrecognizable--are, by virtue of being drawn by the artist who drew the backgrounds, homogenized into the whole, unable to impose their familiarly irreverent personalities or make believable the ad-libbed observations the writers have given them to mouth...