Film

Yellow Submarine

A cartoon built entirely out of Beatles songs and hallucinatory visual puns, Yellow Submarine is less a story than a mood you climb inside for ninety minutes. The band barely voices itself, the plot is thin as tissue paper, and none of that matters — it's a design object first, a singalong second. Perfect for anyone who wants pure sixties eye-candy with a great soundtrack attached.

TMDb rating3.6

Should you watch it?

Watch it if you love psychedelic, pop-art animation where the visual invention runs wild and the jokes come fast and absurd, and you don't mind the Beatles' songs doing the heavy lifting.

Skip it if you want a plot with real emotional stakes, since this is a breezy, episodic ride where the characters are sketched lightly and the dialogue is mostly gentle puns.

What it asks of you: A brisk ninety minutes of sensory overload: sit back, let one surreal set piece tumble into the next, and don't hunt for logic.

Not sure? Find tonight's pick in a minute.

If you liked this

Fantasia1940

The original marriage of classical music and abstract animation — Yellow Submarine's whole trick of letting sound dictate the imagery was invented here, decades earlier and in Technicolor.

But Slower and more reverent than anything psychedelic; some segments feel like a music appreciation lesson.

Fantasia poster

A Hard Day's Night1964

The Beatles playing cheeky, chaotic versions of themselves in a black-and-white farce that basically invented the pop-star mockumentary. Same wit, same songs era, real actors instead of cartoons.

But No color, no surrealism — if it was the trippy visuals you wanted, this is a completely different animal.

A Hard Day's Night poster

Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory1971

Another sixties-adjacent musical fantasy where the sets and songs do the heavy lifting and logic takes a back seat. Gene Wilder's Wonka is his own kind of Blue Meanie-slaying weirdo.

But Live-action and much more plot-driven; the whimsy is darker and more pointed than Submarine's free-floating silliness.

Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory poster

Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from Yellow Submarine

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Wizards1977

Same basic structure — a magical land invaded by a grey, joyless force — rebuilt as a paranoid, R-rated seventies fever dream instead of a psychedelic singalong.

Ralph Bakshi's adult animated fable pits a peace-loving fairy-world wizard against a technofascist warlord using Nazi propaganda footage as a weapon — the good-vs-evil war of colour and joy from Submarine, but filtered through drug-culture dread instead of whimsy.

But Genuinely disturbing imagery and a nihilistic streak; this is the Blue Meanies as an actual fascist threat, not a cartoon punchline.

Wizards poster
More like this (8)

The Nightmare Before Christmas1993

Stop-motion instead of cel animation, but the same commitment to a fully-realized musical world with its own rules, colors, and monsters worth falling for.

But Considerably darker and more Gothic — this is Halloween, not a pastel dreamscape.

The Nightmare Before Christmas poster

Fantastic Planet1973

French stop-motion sci-fi with the same drifting, dreamlike pacing and unmistakably late-sixties/early-seventies design sensibility — surreal, strange, and gorgeous to just sit with.

But Eerie and melancholic rather than fun; no jokes, no songs, and a genuinely unsettling atmosphere.

Fantastic Planet poster

Watership Down1978

Proof that British animation from this era could go anywhere tonally — gorgeous painterly backgrounds and a real sense of myth, made by people from the same animation scene.

But Traumatically violent for something that looks like a children's film; nothing whimsical about the rabbits' war.

Watership Down poster

Heavy Metal1981

An anthology of trippy, music-driven animated segments set to a killer rock soundtrack — the id of Yellow Submarine if it grew up, got high, and lost its manners.

But Gratuitous nudity and violence throughout; this is Yellow Submarine's raunchy older cousin, not its heir.

Heavy Metal poster

Rock & Rule1983

A forgotten Canadian cult oddity: post-apocalyptic rock musical animation with a genuinely eclectic soundtrack and a similarly loose, vibes-first plot.

But Rough production values and a real straight-to-video feel; charming but clearly a budget affair.

Rock & Rule poster

Alice in Wonderland1951

Disney's most purely psychedelic outing before psychedelia was a marketing term — nonsense logic, musical interludes, and character designs that clearly left fingerprints on the Beatles' cartoon world.

But Episodic to a fault, and its gentler, more storybook tone lacks the pop-art edge of Submarine's visuals.

Alice in Wonderland poster

The Triplets of Belleville2003

It takes the exact idea Submarine ran with — let the music and the animation drive the story, plot be damned — and does it in a completely different language, genre, and score.

A nearly wordless French animated adventure with a jazzy, off-kilter score, grotesque comic villains, and the same free-associative visual imagination — just swap Merseybeat for accordion and double bass.

But Almost no dialogue and a much stranger, more melancholic sense of humour; some find it charming, others find it just odd.

The Triplets of Belleville poster

The Adventures of Prince Achmed1926

Long before Submarine treated animation as a design-first art object rather than a vehicle for realism, this film did exactly the same thing — with scissors, cardboard, and no dialogue at all.

The oldest surviving animated feature film, told entirely in silhouette against jewel-toned backdrops — a flying-horse, genie-and-sorcerer adventure that proves the marriage of fantasy and pure visual style is a century-old idea, not a sixties invention.

But Silent, black-and-white silhouettes only, with a slow, fairy-tale pace — as far from a pop soundtrack as animation gets.

The Adventures of Prince Achmed poster

People

Cast

Directing

Writing

Production

Recommended by

Fritz the Cat, The Mighty Boosh, Fantasia, Minions, Help!, Fantasia 2000, Magical Mystery Tour, What's Opera, Doc?, The Point, The Wacky World of Mother Goose, The Man Called Flintstone