
The Simpsons is indebted to Yellow Submarine in a more nuanced way. Typically, you would have your storyboards done and then do the production all at once, but because of the way the production panned out they were sort of doing it all to a large extent on the fly.”

“I don't think they necessarily expected it to come out or to break the boundary that way. in the 1990s), who considers Al Brodax her mentor. It looks so different and each frame winds up being its own piece of art, because of the non-traditional way that the production turned out,” said CJ Kettler, the current president of King Features (which sold the rights to Yellow Submarine to Subafilms LTD. “Part of it was by chance in the process. For instance, some scenes used hundreds of postcards and still pictures of the animators themselves. “With Yellow Submarine, you could tell it was a real labor of love that people poured their personalities into.”īecause of the tight production schedule, animators were forced to innovate while making Yellow Submarine. “For years, Disney had beautiful animation, but it never struck me as very funny, and characters like Mickey Mouse were just the most bland characters possible,” he said. It was the characters in Yellow Submarine that made an immediate impression on Weinstein. It opened a door for animation for adults that didn't follow the rules-for Simpsons, and Ren & Stimpy, and Family Guy, and any modern animation that's also geared towards adults.” “ Yellow Submarine was the first mainstream subversive piece of animation.
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“I don’t think The Simpsons would exist without Yellow Submarine,” said Josh Weinstein, an Emmy-winning writer and producer who has worked on The Simpsons, Futurama, and the upcoming Netflix series Disenchantment. These studios as well as some of the most popular and beloved cartoons of the last 30 years owe a debt of gratitude to Yellow Submarine, which is frequently named one of the most influential animated films in history, serving as a template for modern cartoons, from The Simpsons to Adventure Time. Now studios like Pixar and Dreamworks make fantastical movies that earns billions of dollars and spawn franchises. In the half century since its release, animation has evolved beyond what D'Angelo could have imagined in the '60s. This year, Yellow Submarine celebrates its 50th anniversary.
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The movie would fundamentally changed the way viewers experience animation. (D'Angelo, who had been with King Features only three months when he was assigned Yellow Submarine, would rise to president of the company a few years later.) “After all this effort and the heartache that we went through for that eleven, twelve month period, I really had very much an emotional feeling about the movie,” D’Angelo said. And whoa, what are we gonna do, piss it away? I mean, what if it never even got finished?”Īfter a year of immense pressure, King Features delivered Yellow Submarine in time. “I was the financial guy, being responsible for a million dollars. “It was scary stuff, especially for me,” D’Angelo said. The animators went on strike, halting the production for three weeks.

That’s when an already chaotic production-with D’Angelo sending money to London in small increments so they didn’t have a million dollars sitting in England-hit yet another potentially disastrous snag. “Six months into production, we were only about 40 percent finished with the film, and I was watching the numbers like crazy because you didn’t know what the hell you were gonna wind up with,” D’Angelo, whose now the chairman of King Features, told me. and London, where 250 animators were working tirelessly inside a warehouse in the SoHo neighborhood to draw 25,000 cells for Yellow Submarine, in which cartoon versions of John, Paul, George, and Ringo save an underwater fantasy world. He spent the year traveling between the U.S. In those days, animated films took years and roughly four times that much money to develop. However, the budget, and the production schedule, was an insane request. The movie needed to be finished in eleven months.Ī year earlier, Al Brodax, then the president of King Features, a company that distributes content (including comic strips) to newspapers, had pitched Beatles manager Brian Epstein on turning their hit song "Yellow Submarine" into a movie.
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In the summer of 1967, Joe D’Angelo, a young business manager at King Features was given a million dollars and told to figure out how to finance a feature-length film with the most popular band in the world.
