It’s taken sometime to process the graphic impact of Heinz
Edelmann’s The Yellow Submarine. George
Dunning is credited for directing this Beatles feature film but the design was
singularly birthed by Heinz Edelmann.
Unfortunately both men have passed away, but even so, I believe history
has left a trail that might account for how this style developed.
The Beatles album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was
a fusion of contemporary rock & roll and Victorian influences, including
the British survival of two World Wars and the teachings of Aleister
Crowley. Producer George Martin further
sweetened the mixture with classical orchestrations. This touch of old and new sensibilities was
simultaneously happening in the graphic arts of the time too.
Artists like Milton Glaser reached back into the past,
recycling vestiges of Art Nouveau and the later Art Deco to create a
contemporary style for the 60’s commonly called Pop Art. Heinz Edelmann also used this template to the
design the world of Pepperland for The
Yellow Submarine and caricatured the current designs with the fashionable
bell-bottoms and boots of the day blown up to ridiculous proportions. This style was pirated by lesser talents like
Peter Max through out the Psychedelic era.
Now, in the world of animation Walt Disney had impacted the
field to the point that everyone was becoming a clone of Walt’s graphic style
which tried to emulate nature more and more.
Two filmmakers, Anthony Gross & Hector Hoppin, choose to experiment
with the radically different aesthetic backlash Art Deco and the Modern Art
movement was to the traditional classical representation.
Anthony Gross & Hector Hoppin made the Art Deco film Fox
Hunt and being a British film that gained some notoriety, it’s not unreasonable
to think that a young Heinz Edelmann or George Dunning might have seen it as
impressionable youths. Graphically The
Yellow Submarine owes a debt to Art Deco but there are a few scenes which might
point to a direct influence. Fox Hunt
has equestrian riders coming down Art Nouveau staircases very similar to the
ones Ringo drives his red car down in The Yellow Submarine. It could all be coincidental I suppose,
but…
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| Riders descending staircases in Fox Hunt |
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| Ringo's car descending staircases in The Yellow Submarine |
I did an earlier article on Gross and Hoppin speculating that their film La Joie de Vivre may have influenced the 1940 Disney classic Fantasia. You can find it here: https://joelbrinkerhoff.blogspot.com/2011/10/la-joie-de-vivre-influencing-fantasia.html
