
18 Even if they had wanted to be more involved, it is unlikely they could have.
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This was partly because they considered the cartoon TV series a “rip-off” and wanted nothing to do with a feature that was anything like it. The Beatles had little direct involvement in Yellow Submarine. The chimneys in the foreground now dominate 14 Dunning’s work on the film is limited to the “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” sequence, which he created with animator Bill Sewell, 15 but his most important contribution was the decision to go beyond what was expected, and then hire the team who could achieve it. 12 Although it was popular and produced by his studio, Dunning thought the series had a “very poor kind of design” 13 and decided to ignore the wishes of the film’s producer and try to attempt something genuinely creative. This was a fraction of what Disney (the only company producing animated features at that time) spent in terms of time and money on one of its films. In fact, the original idea of a Beatles animated film was simply an extended version of one of the TV episodes, which explains why the filmmakers were given 11 months to deliver a feature with a budget of less than a million dollars. The most commercially successful of these had been The Beatles (1965-1967). With other former UPA animators, he then formed an animation company in London, where he directed the prize-winning shorts The Apple (1959) and The Flying Man (1962), but paid the rent by producing commercials and low budget cartoon TV series that adapted UPA’s limited animation techniques. While there, Dunning worked on several Mr. In the mid-1950s, he moved on to UPA, at that time the freshest and most inventive animation studio in the United States, run by Canadian expatriate Stephen Bosustow. The Toronto-based company produced some of the country’s first television commercials and gave the experimental filmmakers Michael Snow and Joyce Wieland, along with animator Richard Williams, 11 among others, their first jobs in the industry. He left the NFB in 1949 to help found Graphics Associates, Canada’s first private animation company. Dunning’s most memorable work at the NFB was as director of the classic Cadet Rousselle (1946), an innovative stop-motion film that employed flat metal figures rather than puppets, for the very popular “Chansons de chez nous” series. The film’s director was George Dunning, a Toronto-born graduate of the Ontario School of Art who had been one of the first animators hired by Norman McLaren when he set up the National Film Board of Canada’s animation department in 1942.

there is always a bit more colour than one would expect, and a bit more design.” 10 As he said, “I did try to consciously overload the audience with impressions. Hieronimus argues that “the 1960s are defined by the pop art nouveau look as much as they created it, and that designers around the world were picking up the same ‘vibe’ and adapting it their own way.” 9 Edelmann’s version of this “vibe” was a deliberate attempt at a psychedelic experience. Max or his work during the entire production period, nor was he mentioned by, or known to anyone else on the team.” 7 Edelmann was, however, aware of other pop artists, including Milton Glaser, 8 who is referenced in the sequence where the Beatles’ music brings the Pepperlanders back to life, as a woman’s hair becomes a psychedelic rainbow in the manner of Glaser’s famous poster of Bob Dylan. 6 Edelmann states categorically that “I never thought of Mr.

The design of Yellow Submarine is sometimes credited, by himself as well as others, to the artist Peter Max, but he did not become well known until a bit later and had no influence on the film. 1 However, Yellow Submarine quickly developed a strong cult following, not least among those looking for an appropriate film to watch while on an acid trip. box office, compared to the $11.5 earned in the United States during its initial run by Disney’s The Jungle Book (Wolfgang Reitherman, 1967), which had been released the year before. Perhaps because it was reviewed seriously by critics and perceived as more geared toward adults than children, it was on its immediate release only a modest hit (earning under $1 million at the domestic U.S.

In an era when the genre was dominated by Disney, it was something completely different, an exuberant explosion of styles that abandoned Disney-style realism and, instead of the show tunes typically used in these films, had at its heart a collection of rock ‘n’ roll songs by what was then the most popular band in the world. The animated feature film Yellow Submarine (George Dunning, 1968) was an unusual film for its time. A Deep Dive in a Yellow Submarine Some Notes on the Filmmakers and References in the Classic Animated Featureīy David Hanley Volume 26, Issue 1-2 / February 2022 17 minutes (4222 words)
