Yellow Submarine

Yellow Submarine is a confounding trip of a movie. Even calling it a movie might be misrepresentative, as it barely functions as a such, given it has only the thinnest of narratives necessary to stitch together its madcap swirl of visuals. The animation here really is the draw. It falls somewhere between 70’s Hanna-Barbara and Terry Gilliam’s Monty Python animation; somewhat stiff and awkward, sketchy (like, literally sometimes feels like a sketch), but also wildly detailed and full of energy. Visually, this movie never stops. Ever. There are details within details within details all over the place. The story is there to provide a thread to connect the jukebox music video of this movie with a through line. But if you’re coming here for a story, I mean, that’s on you. This isn’t meant to be taken seriously. Yellow Submarine is meant for one thing: to be a wild visual backdrop for a playlist of Beatles songs. Hell, even the Beatles themselves aren’t in it until the very end; their avatars are voiced by other people, and it isn’t even close. Only Beatles fans will find watching this movie entertaining, and even then, this movie is meant more to be a musical kaleidoscope than anything. It is with that that I say it was a fine experience, and certainly emblematic of where the band was at at the time, but you have to love late era Beatles to care about this, and even then, you gotta be in the right head space. That’s my preferred era, and I still mostly sat trying to process what I saw. It’s beautiful to look at and listen to, and I don’t fault it for not being anything more when it wasn’t trying to be … I just can’t say that what it is had a great impact. It was a 90 minute music video. There’s just a ceiling on that for me.