Word: edelmann
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...Joyce's Ulysses, offers nothing in the way of stylistic innovation. Although advance publicity had promised something more inventive, it doesn't much matter. Working against tough obstacles--among them a foreknowledge that the songs would be 11/2-years-old before the movie's opening--director George Dunning, designer Heinz Edelmann, and a gaggle of writers have turned out an opulent, occasionally mind-bending piece of literate whimsy which must be largely reckoned a success...
Yellow Submarine exists in stylistic limbo. Edelmann's designs are too artistically eclectic, his figures too difficult to animate, to enable an attempt at the fluid control of the Disney method. At the same time, a compromise had to be reached since the stark backgrounds and limited movement of UPA or Hanna-Barbera (Yogi Bear) lack power and potential for complete realization of its creator's imaginative ideas. A strange animal resulted: stylistic form is almost non-existent, the movement of the cartoon figures is executed competently but no better, editing is largely unoriginal, and Edelmann's drawings--the frame...
HERE YOU have to give Edelmann points: the subtle coloring works consistently well, and most of the malevolents (Blue Meanies and denizens of the Sea of Monsters) are top-notch cartoon creations. An evil-grinning feline called a Butterfly Stomper provides a hysterical 30 seconds of irrelevant wickedness; a flying glove proves a wonderfully Kafkasque weapon, and an anteater-cum-dinosaur happily devours everything in sight (including the frame background) by drawing it into his vacuum-cleaner snout. "So long, sucker," yells a Beatle as they escape. Nonetheless, the eclecticism of Edelmann's drawings disturbs as much as it captivates...
...overall design effect is not, as the Beatles have implied in interviews, the brilliance of Edelmann's concoctions, but the pervasive atmophere of warmed-over Milton Glaser. His Signet Shakespeare cover figures, Eye Magazine poster art, and advertising lay-out landscapes abound with stifling frequency, serving as the film's only visual leveller. The film purports to be innovative but is in reality a digest of today's kickiest commercial art on sale in various and provocative forms...
...taken completely at face value rather than interpreted. Thus, Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds is accompanied by diamond-studded women standing on stars, Eleanor Rigby juxtaposed with silkscreened photographs of lonely people. Paradoxically, Yellow Submarine's best moments come during the literal Lucy In The Sky number, when Edelmann treats his audience to contour line drawings filled with rapidly changing roughly blocked masses of color. It is as if Charles Dana Gibson's awesome drawings were suddenly--gloriously--psychedelicized, and it works like crazy...