--- title: "Yellow Submarine" year: 1968 kind: "film" canonical: "https://film.one/film/yellow-submarine" fi1m_score: 74 critics_score: 75 critics_reviews: 14 published: "2026-09-17T06:16:46.066790+00:00" updated: "2026-09-17T06:16:57.768185+00:00" region: "US" licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL." --- # Yellow Submarine (1968) Directed by George Dunning · 1h 30m · MPA G · Music, Animation, Adventure, Comedy, Fantasy **Fi1m score: 74** · Critics 75 from 14 reviews *In a sentence:* A record sleeve you can walk around inside for ninety minutes, puns included > George Dunning’s cartoon voyage to Pepperland is the boldest thing the Beatles put their name to on film, and every song sequence is worth the trip. Between the songs, four credited writers pass the time with puns. We recommend it, with patience. ## Synopsis Pepperland, a bright kingdom under the sea, is attacked by the Blue Meanies, who hate music and turn everything they touch grey and silent. Their Chief (Paul Angelis) sets his army loose on the bandstand where Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is playing. The Lord Mayor (Dick Emery) sends the elderly conductor Old Fred (Lance Percival) to fetch help in a yellow submarine. Fred surfaces in Liverpool, finds Ringo (also Angelis) walking the streets at a loose end, and follows him home, where John (John Clive), Paul (Geoffrey Hughes) and George (Peter Batten) are collected from various rooms. The four set off back to Pepperland through a chain of strange seas, each with its own hazards and each set to a Beatles song. ## Review The Beatles are in *Yellow Submarine* briefly, uncredited, and they did not voice their own cartoons. What George Dunning had instead was Heinz Edelmann’s designs, four credited writers and the songs, which are the Beatles’ own and are the reason the film exists. It is a 90-minute attempt to draw what the records sound like. When it is doing that, it is one of the most inventive animated films of its decade. When it is talking, it is waiting for the next song, and so were we. Edelmann is the film’s real author. Pepperland is a hillside of paper flowers and striped bandstands in colours nobody had put on a cinema screen at this scale, flat and printed-looking, nearer a poster than a painting, and John Williams, credited with cinematography, keeps it that way on the cels. The Blue Meanies who invade it are the best thing here: a squat army in Napoleon hats with too many teeth, tall Apple Bonkers who drop fruit on people’s heads, a flying glove the size of a house that points before it strikes. The cartoon Beatles, long-faced men in tight jackets, are the dullest things on screen. They are there to walk us through the gallery. The voyage passes through a Sea of Time, a Sea of Science, a Sea of Monsters and a Sea of Holes, and each is an excuse for a song, and each song is animated differently. ‘Eleanor Rigby’ is the one we did not expect. Dunning drops the cartoon Beatles almost entirely and fills the frame with photographs of a grey Liverpool, docks and terraced streets and figures who do not move, tinted blue and slid across the screen so that a whole city seems to be shuffling past. It moved us more than anything else in the film, and it is over quickly. ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ does the opposite: dancers traced from live film and coloured in shifting inks, so the figures are real and nothing around them is. Brian J. Bishop cuts these passages on the beat, plainly, and the songs can carry it. The voices are a curiosity. Paul Angelis does Ringo as a flat Scouse mumble and the Chief Blue Meanie as a shrieking aristocrat, and is good at both. John Clive’s John has the nasal edge; Geoffrey Hughes’s Paul has the head-boy cheer. George is shared between Peter Batten, who goes uncredited, and Angelis, and if you listen you can hear the join. Dick Emery voices the Lord Mayor and Jeremy Hillary Boob, Ph.D., the Nowhere Man, a small furry academic who rhymes everything and of whom the film is fonder than we were. Lance Percival’s Old Fred, the conductor who fetches the band, is the one voice with warmth in it. Between the songs, the writers, Lee Minoff, Al Brodax, Jack Mendelsohn and Erich Segal, who would shortly write *Love Story*, keep the cartoon Beatles talking, and what they talk in is puns. There are a great many. Perhaps one in five landed with us. The Sea of Monsters, where the submarine is chased by a creature that hoovers up everything in sight, is the one long stretch where the pictures do the writers’ work for them. Elsewhere we were bored, and it took us a moment to admit it, because the film is so pretty that boredom feels like ingratitude. It is not. The Blue Meanies do give the film a spine. When they arrive they freeze Pepperland’s people grey with a bang from their gloved hands, and the first attack on the bandstand, the band still playing as the colour drains out of them, has more menace than we remembered. Angelis’s Chief, all giggles and tantrums, is a proper villain, and his hatred of music is the one idea the film takes seriously. It is a U certificate. The songs will hold a child; the chat between them will not, and the glove may follow one or two of them to bed. Set beside the band’s live-action films it is the odd one out. *A Hard Day’s Night* has the Beatles in it, quick and rude and themselves; this has their records, and men drawing to them. Most animation of the period told stories and asked you to mind about a rabbit or a princess. Dunning and Edelmann had no interest in that, and the story is there so the pictures have a route from one to the next. Watch it at home, where you can turn it up for the songs and talk through the rest. The film half expects you to. *Fi1m score 74, published 17 September 2026.* ## What the critics say Most critics like Yellow Submarine, and mostly for the look of the thing. Heinz Edelmann’s design draws the warmest notices, with reviewers listing the pop-art imagery, the shifting styles and the grotesque, matter-of-fact creatures as the film’s real achievement. The songs are the other constant. The set-pieces built around them are where the film comes alive; the Eleanor Rigby sequence is named more than once as the standout. Several reviewers think it has aged better than the Beatles’ live-action films. The reservations gather around the story, which is variously called perfunctory, disposable and flabby, with dull patches whenever the music stops. The spread is narrow, most reviews sitting between good and very good, and only Paste dissents, finding nostalgia rather than brilliance and some of the animation creepy. The Guardian is warm but declines to rank it among the band’s best, and The Times warns that children may be bored. ### Reviews we read (14) - **RogerEbert.com**, Roger Ebert (90/100, inferred): The film is the most original and inventive feature-length animated cartoon in years, sailing in a world of pure fantasy with strange creatures and designs that delight the eye. It exists on two levels, beautifully simple and childlike on one and erudite and deep on another, with fanciful animation illustrating the Beatles songs. [Read](https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/yellow-submarine-1968) - **Slant Magazine**, Joseph Jon Lanthier (90/100, inferred): Yellow Submarine is an extended pop-art commercial for the Beatles' records and the most worthwhile object to emerge from their shadow, with gloriously lysergic excess and a cheerful naïveté encapsulated in its message that music is better than violence. The critic singles out the phenomenal high-def restoration for praise. [Read](https://www.slantmagazine.com/dvd/yellow-submarine/) - **Empire**, Caroline Westbrook (80/100, inferred): The critic finds the animation dazzling and the film a charming, imaginative pop art example that highlights the Beatles' fun with their craft, despite a perfunctory plot. They single out the wildly imaginative imagery for praise. [Read](https://www.empireonline.com/movies/reviews/yellow-submarine-review/) - **Time Out**, Dave Calhoun (4/5): The critic finds the film trippy and tune-filled in its re-release, praising its hallucinogenic set-pieces and the way the Beatles songs soar amid the psychedelic fantasy, though noting it is not the best of the band's films. [Read](https://www.timeout.com/movies/yellow-submarine) - **Vulture** (80/100, inferred): The 50th-anniversary restoration highlights the film's idealistic resistance to the status quo through pacifism, positivity, and the power of music in a children's-film register. The critic singles out the counterculture optimism exemplified by 'All You Need Is Love' as a potent but now-cherished utopian mantra. [Read](https://www.vulture.com/2018/07/revisiting-the-beatles-cartoon-lsd-utopia-yellow-submarine.html) - **The AV Club**, Keith Phipps (70/100, inferred): The film holds up well as a preservation of the Beatles' public image as clever, innocent lads who save the world through music and love. The critic praises the imaginative animation, musical sequences, and the appealing naïve message despite some dull patches in the script. [Read](https://www.avclub.com/yellow-submarine-1798195453) - **The New Yorker**, Pauline Kael (70/100, inferred): Yellow Submarine travels from the nursery to the boutique with charm and ease, lighthearted and unpretentious despite its artistic effects, and the story seems as disposable as the banter and images. The movie is charming and has done what hasn’t been done before in animation on this scale, though it is derivative and ultimately nostalgic for the happy anarchism of love. [Read](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1968/11/30/metamorphosis-of-the-beatles) - **The New York Times**, Renata Adler (70/100, inferred): The Beatles' first feature-length cartoon is designed for the most part beautifully by Heinz Edelmann in styles ranging through various artists and mainly the spirit of the Sunday comic strip. It features the songs of the Beatles and emerges as a pepper cartoon. [Read](https://www.nytimes.com/1968/11/14/archives/screen-yellow-submarine-emerges-songs-of-the-beatles-pepper-cartoon.html) - **The Times**, Kevin Maher (★★★★☆): This animated freakout strings a loose mock-heroic narrative around Beatles hits and trippy visuals from 200 animators. Arthouse fans and nostalgia lovers should be thrilled by the Pop Art style, though kids will be bored. [Read](https://www.thetimes.com/culture/music/article/film-review-yellow-submarine-1968-0b8shs833) - **Variety**, Variety Staff (70/100, inferred): This is a full-length animated cartoon in which the prime factor is the appearance of the Beatles in caricature form, with all the ingredients of a novel entertainment including a fantastic voyage, pop music, and puns. Unlike Disney the film makes no concession to sentiment, with characters that are matter-of-fact, grotesque and anti-heroic. [Read](https://variety.com/1967/film/reviews/yellow-submarine-1200421447/) - **The Guardian**, Peter Bradshaw (65/100, inferred): The 2018 re-release of the 1968 Beatles animation has real charm and archival interest in its frame-by-frame restoration, but the critic finds it not in the top rank of Beatles achievements due to flabby whimsy and treading water between songs. The standout is the powerful Eleanor Rigby sequence with its surreal Liverpool imagery. [Read](https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/jul/04/yellow-submarine-review-the-beatles-animation-rereleased) - **Consequence** (90/100, inferred): The critic celebrates the film's vibrant, colorful animation and imaginative visuals as its greatest strength, calling it a parade of color and a joyful reminder of animation's potential, despite a slim story. [Read](https://consequence.net/2018/11/classic-film-review-yellow-submarine/) - **Eye for Film**, Jennie Kermode (80/100, inferred): The critic praises the film as a landmark of psychedelia and animation that has stood the test of time better than the Beatles' live-action films, highlighting its coherent (if nonsensical) story, diverse animation styles, and effective integration of the songs. She singles out the imaginative imagery, bizarre creatures, and the fun, accessible appeal for all ages as key strengths. [Read](https://www.eyeforfilm.co.uk/review/yellow-submarine-1968-film-review-by-jennie-kermode) - **Paste**, Norm Schrager (7.0): The critic finds the restored film evokes nostalgia more than brilliance, with the animation entertaining but sometimes creepy. The timeless Beatles songs lift the film, especially when synced with visuals like in “Eleanor Rigby” and “When I’m 64”. [Read](https://www.pastemagazine.com/movies/yellow-submarine) ## Details - **Director:** George Dunning - **Director:** George Dunning - **Screenplay:** Erich Segal, Al Brodax, Jack Mendelsohn, Lee Minoff - **Cinematography:** John Williams - **Editor:** Brian J. Bishop - **Music:** Paul McCartney - **Producer:** Al Brodax - **Cast:** Paul Angelis as Ringo Starr / Chief Blue Meanie / George / Narrator (voice); John Clive as John Lennon (voice); Dick Emery as Jeremy Hillary Boob, Ph.D. - Nowhere Man / Lord Mayor / Max (voice); Geoffrey Hughes as Paul McCartney (voice) (as Geoff Hughes); Lance Percival as Old Fred (voice); Peter Batten as George (voice) (uncredited); George Harrison as George (uncredited); John Lennon as John (uncredited) - **Runtime:** 1h 30m - **Certificate (MPA):** G - **Release (the US):** 13 November 1968 - **Genres:** Music, Animation, Adventure, Comedy, Fantasy - **Budget:** $250,000 - **Box office:** $1 million - **Trailer:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOlwwoZLoKE ## Where to watch in the US Not streaming, renting or buying in the US at the last check. ## Awards - Hugo Awards 1969: Best Dramatic Presentation (nominated) ## If you liked this - *A Hard Day's Night* (1964): The same four, in the flesh, funnier and faster than their cartoons. - *Fantastic Planet* (1973): French animation with the same faith that a drawing can be a hallucination. - *Interstella 5555* (2003): A Daft Punk album drawn end to end, no dialogue, no puns. - *Allegro Non Troppo* (1976): Italy answers Fantasia, ruder and sadder, with an evolution sequence to match anything here. - *Head* (1968): The Monkees blow up their own image the same year, and mean it. --- © Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Canonical: https://film.one/film/yellow-submarine