IT was 50 years ago this week that Yellow Submarine, The Beatles’ famous animated film, opened to an expectant public desperate for another slice of cinematic wonderment from the Fab Four.

What a shock those fans got. A garish, loud, often farcical and darkly funny technicolour eye-opening, jaw-dropping comedy-action cartoon that was an assault on the senses of even the swinging sixties generation. Yellow Submarine provoked instant adoration and instant distaste in seemingly equal measures before it was realised by critics and audiences alike that the film was a minor masterpiece.

Put it this way, it is still being viewed around the world 50 years on, therefore The Beatles and director and animation producer George Dunning can say their efforts were fully justified.

WHAT WAS IT ABOUT?
YOU mean there was a plot? OK, here goes – spoiler alert! Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club band lives in Pepperland under the sea. Pepperland is attacked by the Blue Meanies who turn the Pepperlanders into statues and steal all the land’s colours. Old Fred jumps into the Yellow Submarine and goes off to Eleanor Rigby’s Liverpool where he recruits John, Paul, George and a depressed Ringo who sing All Together Now as they go off with Fred.

They pass through the seas of Time, Science, Monsters, Nothing – where they meet Jeremy Phud the Nowhere Man – and the Foothills of the Headlands where they encounter Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds.

Then they fall into the Sea of Holes and turn it in to the Sea of Green before arriving in Pepperland where our heroes dress up as Sgt Pepper’s and musically defeat the Meanies. They then free Jeremy who uses transformation magic to make the Chief Blue Meanie a nice guy at the end where there’s a huge party. And there’s a final sequence of The Beatles in live action – the only lines they contributed as their film voices were done by voice-over actors, though the songs were unmistakably their voices.

Hope you followed all that.

WHAT WAS LUCY IN THE SKY WITH DIAMONDS ALL ABOUT?
THE chief controversy and mystery of the film was whether the Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds segment was about drugs. The amazing colours certainly made it a bit trippy, but John Lennon as chief composer always denied it had anything to do with LSD (Lucy Sky Diamonds, geddit?) and said he was inspired by a drawing made by his son Julian as well as the Alice in Wonderland books.

Paul McCartney contributed to the writing and he confirmed Lennon’s account many times over the years.

HOW INFLUENTIAL WAS IT?
AS it used a lot of the music of the Revolver and Sgt Pepper albums, two of the greatest pieces of vinyl ever cut by any band, Yellow Submarine was highly influential both musically and visually.

The animation inspired Terry Gilliam of Monty Python’s Flying Circus and many of his films, and especially the animated sequences in the television series, showed the influence of Yellow Submarine.

It was also the start of a revival for animation as a serious art form in its own right.

WHEN CAN WE SEE IT?
SADLY there was only one chance to see it in cinemas in the UK and Ireland and that’s already past but it’s available on DVD.