Heinz Edelmann's Psychedelic Landscapes

Heinz Edelmann is best known for his work as creative director of The Beatles 'Yellow Submarine' (1968).

Heads the size of mountains, fantastic facial hair, dancing rainbows, ornamental lollipop trees, ballooning bell bottoms with snappy shoes, and deft liquid handling of watercolor are characteristics of his style. 

The Beatles had appeared in animated form prior to 'Yellow Submarine' in a series of short cartoons for ABC tv. They were simple yet highly popular with their pre-teen fans although The Beatles were sick of being portrayed "like the bloody Flintstones".

By 1967 the animated Beatle needed to evolve as the real Beatle had morphed from a mop-topped mod to Sgnt Pepper. After 'Help' and 'A Hard Days Night' the Beatles were reluctant to embark on another feature length film however Al Brodax, the producer of Yellow Submarine, told them "that I could do the work and they could go off and see the Maharishi or whatever they wanted to do. Everybody would be happy if they just signed here."

Edelmann was a hardworking fellow who apparently was able to do his business on four hours of sleep every second night. Despite appearances Edelmann insisted that he had never taken LSD and that his knowledge of psychedelic experience was second hand! 

Here's a still form the 'Yellow Submarine' minute sequence in which Edelmann explains visually how '33661440 and one minute' is a long time... This was apparently his solution to filling in film time when the production started to run out of money.....

mmm look at that detail... 

more stills from 'Yellow Submarine'...

another fantastical Edelmann illustration...

This is a short animation by Heinz Edelmann- It was the introduction sequence for the 'Der phantastische Film' series on German television in the 60's and would be followed by the likes of 'The Fearless Vampire Killers' (one of my faves), 'The Time Machine' and Village of the Damned'. 

Thanks to the Velvet Cave blog for showing me this one....

He also illistrated the first German edition of J. R. R Tolkien's 'The Lord of The Rings'... imagine if he had made a feature length Lord of the Rings animation!