Did you know that Yellow Submarine was only shown in the USSR once in 1975, but the Beatles had a noticeable influence on Soviet cartoons? They’re so psychedelic!

The Box With a Secret (1976)

In 1976, Valery Ugarov directed The Box With a Secret, visually reminiscent of the style of Heinz Edelmann, Yellow Submarine director George Dunning, and the psychedelic illustrations of Peter Max.

The Mirror of Time (1976)

The influence of Yellow Submarine is even more noticeable in the work of production designer Nikolai Koshkin, who worked with director Vladimir Tarasov in the 1970s. 

For the first time, Yellow Submarine appears in their cartoon The Mirror of Time (1976): 

“Once, one of my artists, Nikolai Koshkin, literally quoted scenes from George Dunning’s Yellow Submarine. At that time, it was problematic to touch on anything related to The Beatles anywhere except in science fiction.”

Koshkin, who also drew illustrations for books by Robert Sheckley, Lem, and Soviet science fiction writers, didn’t hide his sources of inspiration: 

“I had seen quite a few American and Japanese feature-length cartoons. Some of them were quite good: for example, Yellow Submarine with the Beatles, or Perpetual Motion and Ice and Fire by American director Ralph Bakshi. I also remember the Japanese film Express 999… Animation is, first and foremost, about dynamics, tricks, and imagination at every turn…”

The Yellow Submarine style later reappears in many of Koshkin’s characters and plots.

Forward, Time!, Contact (1977-78)

For example, in the psychedelic Forward, Time! (1977), dedicated to the work of Vladimir Mayakovsky, there are many graphic solutions similar to Yellow Submarine, such as cut-out animated photographs of everyday objects and people.

And the main character of Contact (1978) resembles John Lennon:

Anniversary (1983)

In the cartoon Anniversary (1983), Koshkin goes further and shows the band in its entirety. This is probably the only depiction of the Beatles in Soviet animation.
The film was dedicated to the 100th anniversary of world animation and the 60th anniversary of Soviet animation and contains many references and characters, including the Beatles in Yellow Submarine style, quickly passing by on an escalator:

Actually, I found the original celluloid (phase) of this frame. The owner said that Nikolai Koshkin was a friend of their family and that animators often took some of the frames home with them:

“As a rule, after the production of a cartoon, the celluloid was sent to the film studio’s archive, but sometimes individual frames were taken home by the creative team as souvenirs. And also, in the chaos of the 1990s, Soyuzmultfilm employees quietly took individual frames/celluloid home from the archives…”

Dissidents in the Yellow Submarine

The album also inspired Soviet hippies to create the “Yellow Submarine Commune,” which was located in an unusual two-story wooden private house in St. Petersburg, rented by the first members of the commune. It was formed without clear rules, intuitively, and existed for about a year from 1977 to 1978.

Beatles Mondegreens in the USSR

In the Soviet Union, the song Yellow Submarine was often distorted and became a meme (read about Beatles mondegreens in the USSR).

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Author: Artur Netsvetaev