Now that iconic status has been taken up by the film itself: American Director Robert Zemeckis is planning a 2012 release of a 3D CGI remake in the style of his The Polar Express to coincide with the Summer Olympic Games in London. Yearbooks, CDs, DVDs, documentaries, autobiographies, energy drinks, lo the outrageous unfurled plummage of the famous! Amongst the avatars of superstardom, however, becoming a cartoon character, a caricature, a puppet, is perhaps the most powerful representation and confirmation of one’s iconic status : think Spitting Image for British politicians and the kudos bestowed on those immortalised with an overbite in The Simpsons. Ringo Starr’s (and Paul Angelis, who voices him for most of the film) sarcastic deadpan delivery is the highlight, brilliantly demonstrated a year later in the live-action film The Magic Christian (alongside Peter Sellers). All four characters seem completely at ease with and/or oblivious to the weird (an infectious comedy sequence with spots and holes and gravity-defying teleportation the perennially irritating Nowhere Man) rules of the world they inhabit and it is the contrast between the everyday and the flabbergastingly odd that makes Yellow Submarine so amusing and so pleasurable. There is a charming camaraderie (though the actual speaking voices of the Beatles are only used in the final scene) in the puns (some written by Liverpudlian poet Roger McGough) and the fecund and frivolous merry-making. This is an anarchic and surreal world, warped as if an eyeglass is gradually and curiously passing over its ravishing rainbow landscape. Indeed, I saw in Yellow Submarine some of the very imagination, the irreverence, the fun, that the world has seen in the Beatles’ music. The thought of a video album (many of the bigger hits are included: Eleanor Rigby, All You Need Is Love and of course the title track itself) masquerading as a musical film did not sit well with me, my instinct being to down periscope and sit it out on the bottom of the ocean. I sometimes shudder at the sickly-sweet catchiness of the Beatles’ tunes hummable, amiable, disposable. To be frank, I sympathise with the Blue Meanies. There he finds their saviours, a band of floppy-haired men who seem tailor-made for the job of putting a song back into these poor people’s hearts. Old Fred travels through the kaleidoscopic world until finally he arrives in Liverpool. In the end they do the only sensible you can do: send a man in a yellow submarine to get help. They have just driven music away and now the people have turned to stone and the beautiful flowers wither as thorns clasp and tear their blooms in a claw-like embrace. The music-hating Blue Meanies ( Blue and Mean) have banned music in Pepperland and sealed Pepperland’s own band inside a dome. Director George Dunning Art Direction Heinz Edelmann
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |