Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Yellow Submarine
1968 · George Dunning · Yellow Submarine on Sightlines
The Meanies come over the hill and the colour runs out of Pepperland like water out of a tub. Flowers go grey. The bandsmen stop mid-note and stay stopped. What is left is the drawing of a place instead of the place: outline where there was bloom, silence where a brass band was.
Stay on that image, because the whole film is folded into it.
Usually when a film drains its palette, the drain is decoration. Somebody died, somebody lost, and the grey tells you how to feel about a loss the plot already delivered. Dunning's film has no such plot underneath. The colour is the loss. Grey is the tyranny, entire. So when the Beatles arrive and repaint the place, there is nothing left over for the repainting to symbolise. It is the victory.
Deleuze called this kind of image affective colour, and the idea is simpler than it sounds. Normally a red dress is a red dress, worn by a woman who is sad for reasons you could state in a sentence. Sometimes a colour stops being a property of things in the scene and starts absorbing the scene, so that the hue and the feeling become one object you cannot peel apart. Live-action can only push so far toward this, because the world arrives already coloured. A drawn world has no colour it didn't decide on. Yellow Submarine takes the licence completely.
Now, the plot. There is one, and it's the oldest one: a paradise falls to joyless tyrants, heroes arrive, paradise returns. Deleuze's name for this shape is the large form of the action-image — a vast situation bears down on people until somebody's decisive act turns it over. The Meanies hold Pepperland. Old Fred escapes by submarine to fetch help. The help arrives carrying songs, and the situation flips. Force against force, with the terms in perfect opposition: colour against grey, music against silence, love against malice.
The thing worth noticing is how little weight the film puts on any of it. The quest is a clothesline. The sensory-motor machinery (see a problem, act, resolve it) runs fast and thin in the background so the film can spend its real time somewhere that machinery cannot go.
Where it goes is the seas. Time, Science, Monsters, Nothing, Holes. These are not places. You could not draw a map with them on it. Deleuze found spaces like this in postwar European cinema, in bombed lots and corridors and fields that had quit their job of hosting action, and called them any-space-whatever: space that has stopped being a setting and become a pure state instead. He found them in rubble. Dunning simply drew them. The Sea of Nothing is the cleanest case, an emptiness offered as itself, and the submarine's passage through it is built from graphic recession and repetition rather than from any perspective a camera could occupy.
Then comes the move that makes the film genuinely strange. In limited animation you hold the figure and move the world behind it, because that saves drawings. Held cels, minimal in-betweening, backgrounds sliding and scaling to fake a camera. This was a budget decision: eleven months, over a hundred artists and technicians, no money for Disney's fluency. But it arrives at something Deleuze identified as one of cinema's deepest tricks, the movement of world, where the character stops moving and is moved instead, the dance absorbing the dancer. "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" is where to look. The figures are rotoscoped, traced from filmed people, so they carry the uncanny fluency of real bodies. And they float in abstract fields that belong to no location at all. Living motion, with nowhere to put it.
That also inverts what Deleuze assumed about cartoons. He thought the drawn film sat squarely inside the movement-image, because a drawing never gives you a pose; it describes a figure in the act of forming, an ordinary instant sampled out of continuous change. Yellow Submarine mostly refuses that. Its compositions are flat, poster-like, information-dense, and held. It gives you designed instants, tableaux, in sequence. The inheritance there is precise: UPA's graphic modernism in Gerald McBoing-Boing, with its abstract colour fields and illustration-first staging, and Eyvind Earle's flattened tapestry backgrounds for Sleeping Beauty, which had already started treating design as the subject rather than the surface.
The rest of the family is just as legible. Fantasia invented the unit the film runs on: the song as a self-contained visual world, generating its own universe, joined to its neighbours by nothing. "Pink Elephants on Parade" in Dumbo taught animation to morph freely out of physical logic under the pressure of music, which is what the psychedelic interludes do — dream-images with no dreamer to own them, circuits of metamorphosis unanchored to anybody's memory. Norman McLaren at the NFB, where Dunning trained, had been cutting abstract imagery shot-for-beat to music for years. Fleischer's Gulliver's Travels supplied the rotoscope.
What Dunning and Heinz Edelmann added was the anthology of idioms. Op-art checkerboards. Art Nouveau curves. Victorian collage. The numerals that build "When I'm Sixty-Four." Photographs of Liverpool laid into "Eleanor Rigby" as though documentary were one more graphic layer. Each song gets its own world and its own rules, and between them the cuts don't connect. They rhyme, or they joke. Deleuze's word for a cut that joins across a gap rather than closing it is the interstice, the AND. Continuity editing says and then, over there. This film says and, and leaves the gap open.
The consequence is a form the culture took decades to catch up to. It is routinely called a proto-music-video anthology, and that's right: the song-as-world unit, cut to the track, indifferent to story, is now the ordinary grammar of popular moving images. It also made the case, at a moment when English-language animation was assumed to be children's fare, that a feature could be carried by graphic invention alone — not by the illusion of life, which had been the only yardstick anyone was using, but by design that never pretends to be anything else.
The film even supplies its own critic in advance: Jeremy Hillary Boob, Ph.D., the Nowhere Man, a whirlwind of erudition that accomplishes nothing at all. Fair warning, taken.
So watch it again and watch for the holding. Notice the moments where the drawing stops moving and the world does the moving instead. Notice how little the plot is asked to carry, and how much the palette is. Then the question the film leaves open, which is not a naive one: if a world can be ruined by taking its colour away and restored by putting it back, what does that tell you about worlds? Animation is the only art in a position to ask honestly, because it is the only art that has to choose every colour it has.
Concepts in play
- affective colour — Pepperland staged as saturated colour and flowering form; the Meanies' invasion staged as a literal draining — colour leached to grey, figures frozen, music silenced — with no separate dramatic loss underneath it for the colour to illustrate.
- movement of world — Limited animation, held cels, and 'camera movement' staged through the scaling and sliding of graphic elements; most fully in the rotoscoped 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds' passage, where traced human figures move with filmed-in-life fluidity against abstract fields that are not a place.
- espace quelconque — The 'seas' the submarine traverses — Time, Science, Monsters, Nothing, Holes — are pun-worlds, conceptual rather than geographic, externalizing states of mind and language games instead of hosting action.
- any-space-whatever: emptiness — The Sea of Nothing: an emptiness presented as itself, its space generated by graphic recession and repetition rather than by photographic perspective.
- action-image, large form (SAS) — The quest-romance armature: Pepperland drained and enslaved presses until Old Fred fetches the Beatles, whose songs decisively restore colour, sound and love — an armature the film itself keeps deliberately thin, 'a clothesline for set pieces.'
- binomial — The Manichaean opposition the dramaturgy runs on — colour against greyness, music against silence, love against malice; the Beatles bearing songs against the music-hating Blue Meanies.
- privileged instants — Flat, poster-like compositions, held cels and minimal in-betweening inherited from UPA (Gerald McBoing-Boing) and Eyvind Earle's tapestry backgrounds for Sleeping Beauty: designed tableaux in sequence rather than the continuous formation of a figure that Deleuze took to be the cartoon's default.
- onirosign (dream-image) — The psychedelic song interludes, freely morphing and decoupled from physical logic under the pressure of music, descending directly from 'Pink Elephants on Parade' in Dumbo — dream circuits tied to no localizable memory or dreamer.
- interstice / the AND — Within numbers, image ideas succeed one another by graphic rhyme or comic non sequitur rather than by continuity, and each song is a self-contained edited unit with its own visual world, joined to the next across a gap.
- the closed set (cadre) — Bold, poster-like graphic composition that withholds conventional depth in favour of layered colour fields, treating the flat picture plane as the film's compositional system.