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 rating7.2

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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

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Wizards1977no page yet

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.

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 Planet1973no page yet

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.

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 & Rule1983no page yet

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.

Alice in Wonderland1951no page yet

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.

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

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Recommended by

The Mighty Boosh, Fantasia, Help!, Fantasia 2000