Yellow Submarine

By RICHARD CORLISS

In 1968, 31 years after Disney's Snow White, various heads came together to show how an animated feature could be hip, visually fecund and (remember?) psychedelic. Four writers, including Love Story's Erich Segal, invented bizarre universes for the Beatles to stroll through, and designer Heinz Edelmann dreamed up creatures whose beguiling oddness suggests a collision of Dali and Dr. Seuss. Seen now, in a long-overdue video release, the film registers as an obvious inspiration for Sesame Street, Monty Python and MTV, and is a delight on its own. Thirty-one years on, nothing in feature animation has matched its endless, exhausting inventiveness.

--By Richard Corliss