Over 35 years later, this is still an innovative animated film: colorful, clever and different. In fact, you'd have to look hard to find a more colorful film ever made.

The Beatles characters are fun, spouting a number of good puns and inside jokes concerning lyrics from some of their past songs. The bad guys here, the "Blue Meanies," are also fun to watch and really different from anything you've seen.

This is wild stuff which can appeal to adults even more than kids. The only improvement I would have made would have been to shorten it a bit. Even at a fairly short 90 minutes, some could have been trimmed.

The DVD is fine, except for the last 30 minutes when it gets grainy. However, the 5.1 surround sound more than makes up for that, affording the viewer to hear all these famous Beatles songs in a better format that surrounds you as a CD could never do.

if this is a magic land, then this is Pepperland. If this is a magic film about this magic land, then this is Yellow Submarine. I believe, and many will agree with me on that, YS is the cleverest and most wonderful artifact of the hippie era. Here, you see no blatant drug references, no rude words, no endless acid space jams. No, here, the essence of the Flower Power time is represented as a smart, vivid, multicolored fairy tale. The idea that music may save the world and that the yellow submarine may be an escape from bleak, dull gray world is great. But even if we put this philosophizers aside, we view hilariously funny, colorful, brisk movie, with The Fab Four as a brilliant cast. And the lines! They are great, as when Ringo does exactly what the captain told him not to, or when The Nowhere Man starts his unforgettable gibberish, or when at the very end the real Bealtled appear, with all those quips and jokes. This is like a sweet, long, and very kind dream. May it never end!

What COULD compare? Yellow Submarine is 130,000 frames (90min x 60sec x 24 frames/sec) of classical, pop, tribute (to earlier animation styles), and original art from Da Vinci to Warhol to Picasso to Popeye to unbridled hallucination, drawn to a best-of-Python screenplay of non-sequiturs, puns, and pokes at institutions from cold-war antagonists to (governor) Reagan's paranoid National Guard deployment against counterculturists.

It's a feast for the senses and sensibilities. One can revel in the flashing, dancing colors and art styles--most of which well-shame anything Disney ever attempted and make today's phony-depth digital claptrap look like spilled esophageal reflux. The soundtrack is a condensed spectrum of the range with which Lennon/McCartney/Harrison composed, from deeply contemplative (Eleanor Rigby) to near-post-adolescent exuberance (Harrison's contributions) to silly-love-song filler showtunes (All Together Now). The dialog exchanges keep viewer's verbal senses on the edge of their seats. The theme undercurrents lightheartedly appeal nostalgically to those who were drawn to it in its theatrical release, historically to those who still wonder 'what the 60s was all about', without getting in the way of sheer artistic ebullience.

If you're an adult, it helps to like animation and British-invasion-era music (or Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Rodgers & Hammerstein, for that matter). If you're an adult watching it with your kids (there's nothing offensive), be prepared for them to groan at Disney/Pixar/Nickelodeon rubbish from then on, and say "I want more of THAT!"