Near-End-of-Year Animation: Yellow Submarine

At the beginning of the year, I watched for the first time an animated feature film made in Japan half a century ago. Horus: Prince of the Sun did seem an interesting piece of work and one step along a path leading to today (although I certainly haven't taken in every other step along that way). The supplementary material on-disc, though, in trying to build up just how important the movie had been, mentioned another animated feature film from 1968 with comments I might risk paraphrasing from memory as "Yellow Submarine was a cheery holdover from 1967's doubtless chemically enhanced optimism; Horus was a display of 1968's grittier, violent, protesting mood." At least sometimes a little resistant to feelings of being hard-sold (especially when it seems to include bonus putdowns), I got to thinking about that other movie and how long it had been since my family had taped it off the educational channel's movie show (along the way, I've collected the canonical central albums of the Beatles discography), and before the year was out I'd got around to ordering a Blu-Ray of it. (In the meantime, I'd watched a third movie first opening in 1968, 2001: A Space Odyssey, over again. Michael Benson's book Space Odyssey had mentioned some people had gone straight from working on Stanley Kubrick's movie to Yellow Submarine, managing to find a more interesting job than tracing and painting black mattes over endless frames of model photography to aid in compositing the special effects.)
( Memory and influence )