Under the Influence with Terry O'Reilly - The Beatlology Interviews: Yellow Submarine Animator Tom Halley

Episode Date: August 14, 2024

Tom Halley was one of the brilliant animators on Yellow Submarine. The film is considered one of the most inventive animated films of all time. In this interview with the late animator, he tells us how he came to be involved, how they all managed to create this classic film in just 11 months. And much to our surprise, Tom tells us he was also an animator on the Beatles cartoon series. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi, it's Terry O'Reilly. As you may know, we've been producing a lot of bonus episodes while under the influences on hiatus. They're called the Beatleology Interviews, where I talk to people who knew the Beatles, work with them, love them, and the authors who write about them. Well, the Beatleology Interviews have become a hit, so we are spinning it out to be a standalone podcast series. You've already heard conversations with people like actors Mark Hamill, Malcolm McDowell, and Beatles confidant Astrid Kershaw. But coming up, I talk to May Pang, who dated John Lennon in the mid-70s. I talk to double fantasy guitarist Earl Slick, Apple Records creative director John Kosh. I'll be talking to Jan Hayworth,

who designed the Sgt. Pepper album cover. Very cool. And I'll talk to singer Dion, who is one of only five people still alive who were on the Sgt. Pepper cover. And two of those people were Beatles. The stories they tell are amazing. So thank you for making this series such a success. And please, do me a favor, follow the Beatleology interviews on your podcast app. You don't even have to be a huge Beatles fan, you just have to love storytelling.

Subscribe now, and don't miss a single beat. This is an apostrophe podcast production. I hear the beatle I hear the beatle I hear the beatle I hear the beatle I hear the beatle I hear the beatle I hear the beatle I hear the beatle I hear the beatle I hear the beatle I hear the beatle Beatleology. Back in the late 90s, I was a co-founder of a magazine called Beatleology. It was a magazine dedicated to Beatle fans and collectors.

We talked to top collectors around the world in auction houses, as well as celebrity collectors and people who knew and worked with the Beatles. Those interviews stayed in my office drawer for 25 years. So we thought it would be interesting to dust them off. Back in 1999, it was the 30th anniversary of the Yellow Submarine album. Beetleology magazine wanted to dedicate an issue to the album and especially to the Yellow Submarine film.

And, as with every issue, we had to decide who to interview for the main interview feature. We didn't know it at the time, but one of the main animators for Yellow Submarine lived near us. As a matter of fact, he lived in Oakville, Ontario, just down the highway from Toronto, where he taught animation at a college there. His name was Tom Halley. So we reached out to Tom to ask if we could interview him. He graciously accepted and invited us out to his home in Leafy Oakville. When we arrived, Tom and his wife June welcomed us in, offered us tea and coffee, then we all sat down in their living room.

And there, in the middle of the room, sat a big cardboard box. We instantly knew what was inside. It contained Tom's original pencil sketches from Yellow Submarine. That box sat there for half of the interview,

unopened, just sitting there, teasing us. Tom Halley came to Canada in 1969, just one year after he had completed his work on Yellow Submarine. While Tom worked in London, England and Oakville, Ontario. He was actually born in Scotland. Aberdeen. I lived in Edinburgh from the age of 12. After the war, I went down to London and got into the film business. I went to Edinburgh College of Art. I got a classical training in drawing and painting, and I did halfway through the third year, I went into the RAF for four years, came back. I think it was 46, 47. Did another year.

And then David Hand came over from the States. He was one of the producing directors on Snow White. Brilliant man. Long gone. And he started up the David Hand Studios under J. Arthur Rank. J. Arthur Rank is the big film guy in this act. And I was at art school, as I say, after the war. And a friend of mine had sent away for this test.

He'd heard about it and he looked at it and he said, I don't want to do this. I looked at it and said, I'll do it. And I didn't expect to get anywhere near the place because they had about 400 or 500 applicants. Lo and behold, I got a letter through to go down for an interview from Edinburgh and I got a job, offered a job. So I had to think very, very carefully, should I stay on and carry on with education or get

down? So I decided, no, I'll go back right down there. And that's where I got the training. So all the Disney guys who were there ran a training room for six weeks. And they didn't teach you to draw. You were expected to be able to draw. And after six weeks, we went on to production. And that's how I got into the area of animation. So that went on. We asked Tom if it was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

that inspired him to pursue a career in animation. Snow White is probably the one film that I think is the, what I call, a true animation feature that carried character, good storyline. You can't go wrong with Snow White in Seven Dwarfs. Beautifully told and a little bit maybe sugary in some places for people today, but nevertheless, it is the longest in visual development and the most successful, so far as I'm concerned, that's my own opinion, so far as characterization. I think of all time. To Tom, Snow White was a quantum leap in animation. It changed everything.

He was instantly drawn to it because he always had a pencil in his hand when he was a kid. Before that, at school, I was always drawing. Ever since Soho, I was always drawing, drawing, drawing. I remember imagining as a kid, it wouldn't be great if you could have pictures moving in games, because we have computers now that do just that.

And I had a thick geometry book at school. This is my senior year, and all my school books had drawings on the pages. Terrible, I deformed all the school books. But anyway, I had this little baby artisan going along the top of the page and going over the edge of the print and exploding at the bottom and he flipped through it. I don't know where it came from. I just love to make things

move. We used to see these little flip books, you know, goals and things like that in those days. That was the 1930s. And I remember the math teacher, Sinclair was his name. I had a lot of time for him. I hated school, but I enjoyed geometry and trigonometry. Yes, you heard right.

The future teacher hated school. Yeah, hated school. Hated it. But anyway, he flipped through the math teacher, and he sort of smiled, put it down, shook his head. But no, animation is something I think, maybe it's partly part of theatre, I don't know. I really can't explain where it comes from.

It's just there. Eventually, Tom landed an animating job at UPA, United Productions of America, which had been founded in 1941 by former Disney animators during a Disney animators strike. UPA coming over to Britain in those days was an interesting start because Richard Williams, he was Canadian, George Dunning, he was Canadian, came over with UPA. And George Dunning, of course, was the gentleman who was the head director of CBC television cartoons. And the television had just started up. George Dunning will play a big role in both the Beatles cartoon series and Yellow Submarine.

Born in Toronto, Dunning studied at the Ontario College of Art. He founded Canada's first private animation studio in 1950. Then, in 1955, Dunning moved to New York to accept a position at UPA. A year later, he was sent to manage the UPA office in London, England, but that office was in financial trouble. So Dunning left and opened his own company called TVC, or Television Cartoons Limited, in 1957. He was producing a lot of commercials at the time. George Dunning and John Coates ran TVC, which is where the Yellow Submarine was made. Basically, that was the start of a whole sort of era of the UPA style of commercials and

things that we did at that time. And after that, then, of course, the Beatles started off with a Beatles TV series. Al Brodak's came over, and they had to have a pilot film made. So I was sort of a unit director on that pilot film. The Beatles TV series Tom is referring to is the Beatles cartoon series that originally ran on the ABC network from 1965 to 1967. The series was then repeated many times since, including on MTV in the late 80s.

Not only did Tom create animation for the series, he directed the pilot, which was used to sell the entire idea to ABC. This we did not know. The Beatles series, the original one, that directed the pilot film, Albrodex, which pleased his fans because he sold the series, the original one that directed the pilot film, Albrodex, which pleased his fans because it sold the series, and he came over and shook my hand.

There were lots of us who worked on the series. I guess they're all about my age now. Maybe gone. Some of them are gone, actually. We never sort of felt we were anything special. It was deeply special to me because the Beatles cartoons were the gateway drug that first made me a Beatle fan all those years ago. Those cartoons introduced me to the Fab Four and their music, which I told Tom. Oh, really?

The cartoons were everything to me. A quick story on the Beatles cartoons. Al Brodax had the original idea for the cartoons. He had seen the Beatles on that famous Ed Sullivan show appearance on February 9, 1964, and thought a cartoon series could be made using their song lyrics as a basis for scripts. The next day, he places a call to the Beatles' manager, Brian Epstein, at the Plaza Hotel in New York where the Beatles were staying. He manages to get Epstein's assistant, Wendy Hansen, on the line.

She asks what the call is pertaining to. Brodak says, I saw the Beatles on The Sullivan Show. I think I can help them. Hansen bursts out laughing. 73 million people just watched the Beatles. They're the hottest ticket on the planet, and somebody they don't know on the phone is saying he could help them. But Brodak is a good salesman and manages to pique her interest.

So she agrees to meet Brodak in the Plaza Bar a few hours later. At that meeting, Brodak's explains that his company has produced many popular animated shows, including the Popeye cartoons. He tells her he wants to create an animated television series using the Beatles' likenesses and utilizing their lyrics as storylines. Hansen laughs yet again and says, Don't give up your day job. Brian will hate the idea. She downs her drink and leaves.

The next morning, Wendy calls Brodak's and says, Brian likes the idea. Brodak's is thrilled. He is then told to meet with the Beatles' financial guy, who presents Brodak's with a one-sided onerous contract, and there is no negotiation. The Beatles are hot, and Brodak's is not. Next, Brodak's tries to find a sponsor for the Beatles cartoons to cover production costs. Two weeks of pitching to advertising agencies goes

nowhere. Then, at the last minute, a Chicago toy train company agrees to climb aboard, paying $32,000 per episode. It's a tiny budget for animation, but it's all they've got. Each episode was comprised of two five-and-a-half-minute sequences with two sing-along segments sandwiched in between. Brodax keeps one eye on the possibility of syndication, so these sequences can be mixed and matched to create the perception of even more episodes. Tom Halley directs the pilot.

Brodax takes it to ABC. The network, sensing a bubbling Beatlemania media sensation, likes the pilot and commits to 26 episodes of the Beatles cartoons. Brodak's would eventually produce 39 episodes, which would be sliced and diced into 78 episodes with 75 sing-alongs. Brodak's asks his mentor, animator Norman McLaren, head of the National Film Board of Canada, to direct the series. Norman can't leave his post, but recommends fellow Canadian George Dunning.

Dunning agrees to take the series on, even though the budgets are too small and there's not enough time. It's April and the Beatles cartoon hits the air in the fall. It's more than tight. Dunning's small group of animators work 20 hours a day, non-stop. Somehow, someway, they meet the deadline. On September 25th, 1965, at 10.30 in the morning, the Beatles cartoon debuts. It is a huge success. Dunning received a telegram from ABC TV that said, quote,

Dunning and Brodak's are thrilled. received highest rating of any show on ABC Daytime. Congratulations! Dunning and Brodak's are thrilled. John Lennon hates it. He calls the cartoons flat, unfunny, and bloody rubbish. He says they look like Flintstone outtakes. Brodak's learns an important lesson in that moment. As John speaks, so speaks the group. Lennon is boss.

The band particularly hates the actors' voices, which sound more American than British. As a result, Brian Epstein demands that the cartoons never be broadcast in Britain, ever. But they are on the air in Canada and the U.S., and audiences love them. Tom Halley not only directed the pilot episode of the cartoon series, he was a unit director on many of the episodes. I did the rest.

After, when the series came in, that first series, we worked on, I forget how many films we worked on, but we kept on working. I don't have any drawings from that, I wish I did, but we spent a lot of time going through the live action. Ringo was especially interested in how he drummed this moon with his head, so we had to get all those sort of things into it. To sketch the Beatles just right, Halley and the animators studied A Hard Day's Night and Help movies very closely.

Yeah, just to try to get the character of them. But the Beatles in the Beatles series were a different look. They're more caricatured than they were in the Yellow Submarine. The Beatles were designed by Heinz Edelman, but Heinz Edelman was the designer. This ragtag group of animators would come back together again shortly to tackle Yellow Submarine.

The Beatles have a third picture commitment to United Artists, but Brian Epstein has turned down a stack of screenplays. On top of that, the Beatles are getting ready to head off to India. Wendy Hansen desperately calls Al Brodax and asks for help. Brodax senses an opportunity. He says he has the answer. Let him do an animated feature film, again utilizing their likenesses and some of their songs.

The Beatles can go off to India, and Brodax and his team will toil away in their animation studio. That way, Epstein can relax, and the United Artists' contract will be honored. Hansen thinks it's a good idea, but there's one problem. Epstein and the Beatles hate the cartoon series, and here's Brodak's back again, this time suggesting a full-length animated feature film. But Epstein is backed into a corner and knows it. So without any other options at hand, he reluctantly gives Brodak's the green light. The deal? United Artists approves a $1 million budget.

It must be finished inside one year, and Epstein wants to approve the writer personally. Al Brodaks, sipping his ever-present bottle of Pepto-Bismol, rounds up four writers. They each write up a treatment, and Brodaks puts each treatment into a different colored folder, sends them to Brian Epstein,

and a meeting is arranged. When Brodaks walks into Epstein's office, the four pastel-colored folders are on his desk. Epstein throws them all onto the floor and says they are all, quote, American crap. Brodax picks them all up, puts them back on Epstein's desk, and starts defending them. Epstein sweeps them all to the floor again. The feisty Brooklyn-born Brodacks is incensed

and grabs Epstein by the lapels. Epstein is horrified. His lawyer steps between them to push Brodacks away. In the end, Brian Epstein is afraid United Artists will sue the Beatles if a script isn't approved ASAP.

So, he signs a contract with Brodax and relinquishes the writer approval. The deal is done. Brodax then tries to attract some big-name writers, including Joseph Heller and Mel Brooks, but no luck. Everybody is tied up with other projects. So, Brodax decides he will write it himself, with help from some of the writers from the cartoon series. Eric Siegel, who was then a professor at Yale and who would later go on to write Love Story, is one of those writers.

But Brodak struggles to come up with a main idea for the movie. Then, Ringo comes to the rescue. He says the movie should be about a yellow submarine. A live-action remake of Yellow Submarine was planned around 2010, with Robert Zemeckis set to direct. But the project ultimately fell through. What other film about the Beatles did Zemeckis direct? The answer, after this. Robert Zemeckis directed the movie I Want to Hold Your Hand in 1978. It's one of Terry's favourite comedies. That suggestion of creating a movie around the song Yellow Submarine ignites Brodak's imagination and he's off to the races. A plot slowly emerges.

The antagonists are the Blue Meanies, who are the enemies of joy, color, and music. They invade the tranquil Pepperland and launch an anti-music missile attack. The conductor of Sergeant Pepper's band escapes and convinces the Beatles to return with him in his yellow submarine to save Pepperland. To bring a fresh feel to the film, George Dunning chooses German illustrator Heinz Edelman to art direct the film and create the character designs.

Edelman was an avant-garde artist with a very inventive, colorful, psychedelic style. He never worked in animation before, yet his work on Yellow Sub would redefine the world of animated film. Many people thought Edelman got his ideas from using hallucinogens, but he had never taken a drug in his life and was actually very conservative. The first things Edelman showed Dunning were character sketches of the four Beatles, followed by the Blue Meanies, the Apple Bonkers, and the glove.

Dunning absolutely loved the imagery. It was so surreal, it was challenging for the animators. George Dunning pulled him in. George Dunning is very astute. He had a very good eye for art

and sort of the vein things are going to be in. And Heinz Edelman, the big problem with working from his designs, they tend to be somewhat restrictive, tight, brilliant, and somewhat surreal, which, of course, The Yellow Submarine had a sort of surreal feel to it. The model sheets that went round at that time on the Yellow Submarine were so many. Everybody was trying to make their interpretation to get them to move.

Now, at that time, when the Yellow Submarine came along, they wanted me to go in to look at the styling. You know, it was animation styling as such. It was classical animation, so that a full sort of type Disney animation or a Snow White animation like the Seven Dwarfs may not naturally suit a sort of graphically designed character.

It may look phony, so you have to find some way of moving it. So they want the Sgt. Pepper's band, so I've messed around with that. I have a few development drawings from that, just a fire of glippage. The zen of animation, I call it. Tom believes the key to creating great animation is to become the animation. It's a bit like becoming an actor. You have to act the part in order to draw the part. And that movement is reflected in the line drawings.

He again pointed to that magical unopened box on the carpet. You can't really animate anything unless you become what you're animating. I'm talking about top animate anything unless you become what you're animating. I'm talking about top level, unless you become what you're animating. When you get into something like The Yellow Submarine, where you're taking these designs by Edelman, it's a little bit more designy. It is finding a Sgt. Pepper's band,

how you can move it so it fitted the mode as it were was a bit of a problem but anyway I did that and they line tested it and they liked it and they wanted me to go into control the styling of animation still the storyboard, the end part was still in the storyboard stage pretty well the script, they knew the story but

it had to go through the story development so when I went in originally I had the room where all Brodak's was, and the production studio, and I had my desk there. And I did the scene I have, one of the scenes of the blue minis, where he says, I haven't laughed so much since Pompeii, where he knocks the Max mini, which I have all the rough drawings there,

because we had to work so fast. Again, Tom pointed to that big cardboard box full of his drawings, which was still sitting unopened in the middle of the living room. But Tom kept talking without opening that box. We kept waiting for the moment. They had the story.

Most of the story was pretty well done. They had layout artists doing layouts, and they had most of the animators. So I had these things chucked at me. I was sort of pretty well picking up things because they had to deliver. I know there was a whole sequence they had to deliver, and they were worried about it

because they don't get paid until they deliver the sequence. So after that, I picked up the sea of fish sequence, which I wanted to make a little bit more full animation, but wasn't the time. They wanted to do these effects things. I don't know if you remember the fish, they sort of vibrate different colors. To meet the looming deadline,

Dunning has to bring in more animators. Must have been at least, they must have had at least 20. I was doing sort of rough sequences and then handing the whole thing out in the sheets and going to other people. A lot of that stuff I'd have sent right back and enhanced it and enhanced it but there wasn't time some sequences i would fully animate like those sequences i'd animate all the keys and then basically break down what you have the key points of the sequence and then you put little marks down to show whether you want the drawings were slowing in or slowing out now what you'd have what you call line tests it's on 35 millimeter film and they're run every morning you have what you call rush tests. It's on 35mm film. And they're run every morning. You have what you call rushes.

And you see those on the screen. Disney called it the sweat box where the animators are going because they're serious sweaters. They are serious sweaters because this is the moment when they see if their animation is actually working. And when you're on a tight deadline, the perspiration quotient increases. George Dunning would always make the final decisions.

He's a very creative man. With some directors, what we call moviola directors, because they wait to see it on the moviola to see how it's going to work, which I don't agree with, because we have, some people call them bar sheets or music sheets. It's like music sheets with all the frames and you make out everything and cut everything together. And I did all the sea of fishes in that way and did the layouts from Edelman's drawings. And I think George Dunning whipped those around a little bit this way, that way. You know, everyone likes to say, I made that decision. I couldn't care less about that.

If it worked, that's all that mattered. For much of the process, there was no completed screenplay. The animators were working on song sequences, but the script needed a way to connect all the songs. Eric Siegel and the other writers were pounding away on a storyline, but they had no daily contact with Tom and the other animators. Then, on August 27, 1967, Brian Epstein dies at the age of 32.

His death stuns the Beatles, and as the news ripples through George Dunning's offices, work pauses. But the deadline, that impossible deadline, does not move. One night, the animators worked very, very late, and they forgot Heinz Edelman was still there and accidentally locked him in the studio when they left. When the police later found Edelman climbing down the drain pipe to get out, he was hauled off to jail. Here's the remarkable thing to keep in mind. Dunning's team had only

11 months to finish the entire feature-length film. Incredible, considering the average Disney animated film took four years to complete, with five or six times the budget. The Yellow Submarine deadline was punishing. It is made in one year flat, basically. And that's amazing. Towards the end, there were over 500 artists, that's including cleanup people and trace and paint. Because that was all traced by hand and painted. We had to get big graphic design artists in

to do the clean-up because of the design element in it. Now, the blue minis were about the furthest away from pure what I call flat graphic design. They had more bulk in them, so you could sort of throw them around a little bit more. We wanted to know if a full-scale yellow submarine was ever built at any point to give the animators a model to work from. Yeah, in the yellow submarine, of course,

they made a scale model, a proper model, a grayscale model, photographed it in all different positions. And then they made the stats, the colored stats that they would lift off and run over the drawings. You can only imagine what that would be worth today. The Beatles did make a surprise visit to the animation studio one day. They met with Brodax and Dunning and liked what they saw. The only time Tom actually met the Beatles was when they dropped by during the production of the Beatles cartoons.

The only time we ever saw the Beatles was on the first Beatles series. I think we'd just finished the pilot film and they'd sold the series. I directed the first one and then we'd swap around, give ourselves a rest, and then we'd swap around each one, directing and then we'd sort of swap around each one

directing the next one and so on and so on and the Beatles came in and they were there about two hours I guess and they spent a photo session up in George Dunning's office and they came down Ringo came in the room he's fascinated with what was going on in fact Ringo came in the room. He was fascinated with what was going on. In fact, Ringo seemed to be the sanest of all of them, and he was fascinated with the animation, and so we were sort of showing what we did and things like that. For Yellow Submarine, three actors were hired to voice John, Paul, and Ringo, but Dunning was having trouble finding someone who sounded like George Harrison. He auditions dozens of actors with no luck.

Then one day, at a pub, they overhear a Liverpudlian who sounds just like Harrison. They hire him. His name is Peter Batten. He has never acted a day in his life. But he catches on and does a pretty good job. Until one day, right in the middle of a recording session, two British policemen marched into the studio and arrested Batten. He is an army deserter. Batten was never heard from again. While the Fab Four were animated in the film, the real Beatles did make a hasty live-action appearance

at the very end of Yellow Submarine, which Tom Halley feels was a bit cheesy. They appeared, of course, because of the... I don't know, it's all sort of contracts and politics that I couldn't care less. I'm not a politician, so I always cared away from politics. But they were in the film, as you know, at the end of the film. And I think that is to fulfil some contractual thing with that film.

I guess some people quite like that. I don't know, I just felt it, to me, it's just maybe my feeling that it sort of didn't work for me. I felt that to keep it pure animation, it's a little bit, I don't know, hokey. I'm not sure if general audiences felt that or not, but it just didn't fit, and I thought, why did they have to do that?

Yellow Submarine was finally released on July 17, 1968. Nothing is real. The Beatles. Yellow submarine. Artwork. Photography. Landscapes painted with Beatles sound. Tom Halley attended the premiere in London along with the Beatles. Yeah. I have actually, I have the synopsis that we had and I've been looking.

I know I had the pass to get in there, but I'm not sure where it's gone. I showed it to my sons, and it's on the kitchen table. I'm not sure. I put it somewhere. I have a habit of putting things and never find them anywhere. As Tom said that, he again pointed to the box full of his yellow sub drawings. We were all dying to see them at this point. To prompt him to open it, we asked what he thought of Yellow Submarine as a piece of animation. How did he feel about it now, looking back? I think as a whole, it works as a statement. I don't know

if people really get it. The fact is that we do have lots of luminis in the world. It's a mixture. It's a mixture of very good animation and somewhat wooden animation. But then again, I think it gets away with it because of the styling. Some of the Beatle animations, the walks are very sort of, bit too much towards the abstract,

maybe a little bit too much. Sgt. Pepper's band was, when they did the drawings, the development drawings, I was trying to get life into them because they're going to have abstract movements, you want to get as much character into the things. It's very, very difficult to, I think, to take a style such as Edelman's and animate it and make it exciting to hold an audience. When you get into a very graphic type of design, it's very difficult to sustain an audience. It can get a little bit boring after a bit, tedious.

So the difficulty is you have to have other elements that you can bring in. Keep it moving. Keep the story moving. When you look at how Yellow Submarine captured the zeitgeist of the late 60s, you might be surprised to know that Tom was 43 years old when he worked on the film. So he was about 15 years older than the Beatles. And here's a surprising comment. I never considered myself a part of the 60s, but I understood what was going on. And Tom was never swept up by the psychedelic fever of the times. Not at all. Well, of course, the acid trips, things like that, I never got into.

No, because my own philosophy, I tend to be more of a spiritual person. My own philosophy, so far as that goes, is that we have everything. To me, our minds are the most powerful things we have. And if you take something to enhance it, it's like having a crutch. Whereas if you have that discipline, whether it be meditation or whatever, then it is stronger. It doesn't depend on the crutch. If you take the crutch away, now there are certain insights, I think, that are given that I think are to those things that can be very helpful to some people.

It depends on the individual. And I think if an individual feels they have to do that, fine. Finally, we couldn't take it anymore. I asked Tom this question. Can I hand you that box and we'll keep you here? Is that possible? Okay, yeah. Okay, I will.

Finally, Tom opened the cardboard box and started pulling out his original sketches from the movie. Tom would pull an incredible line drawing out of the box, talk about it, then let it slowly float down to the carpet, one after the other. He would show us an early sketch of a blue meanie

or the Sergeant Pepper band. Now this sequence, the different levels, some mouth drawings and us an early sketch of a blue Meanie, or the Sergeant Pepper Bear. Now, this sequence, there are different levels, some mouth drawings and also the Max Meanie. So I tried to get the ones that were on the same levels, and that's the Max Meanie at the beginning of the sequence. That's the cleanup of the Meanie, and that's another cleanup of him. Then Tom would pull another sheet out of the box. He would show us a model sheet of John Lennon's face, left view and right view. Then another sheet would just be Paul's hands or Ringo's body language as he runs.

Then Tom would just let the sheet slowly waft to the floor. Now these I did very, very fast to try to get some sort of action and excitement into it. And the expression, trying to get a sort of expression on Max's face. Interestingly, Tom much prefers these line drawings to the actual finished animation. He believes the true feel and movement of animation is captured in the line drawings. And when those line drawings are fully rendered, they always lose something in the transition. John Lennon, in some ways, is more difficult to draw.

You know, because most of Edelman's designs are very flat, and what you didn't realize, you have to turn things in animation. So I had to do a lot of exploring. And, see, I prefer the rougher drawings to the finished clean-up or trace and paint. But I know in the markets they tend to sell that stuff, but people don't understand the real essence of what I call the zen of what you do is here. And if this isn't right, the rest doesn't work. When they're cleaned up, they lose life.

So the important thing is you have to get life into the drawings first. Soon, we were all sitting on his living room floor, completely surrounded by his original line drawings from the movie we all knew so well. John Lennon to your right, Ringo to your left, the yellow submarine behind you, all scattered on the carpet. It almost felt surreal. Tom would just casually pull the sketches out of the box and let them drift to the floor. These sort of things you can explore, just roughly, you're basically thinking on paper. And those are not bad model sheets for George. I didn't draw these ones, I drew this one. And the development drawing, now this is some of the drawings, I wish I'd had them all. When I first did the Sgt Pepper band, and they wanted to get a styling for the animation,

they were so tight in a way, sort of almost so wooden. So I was trying to sort of get rid of that woodness without losing the style. And that is the biggest problem. So I just started off with totally free drawings. So these were development drawings. And to me, these are more interesting than these, which are very cleaned up. They tend to lose life.

But basically, that's the whole art of animation is that you cannot animate a character and give life if you animate and clean up by the time it goes through the clean up process trace and paint it'll just go dead as a bone

we wondered if the Sgt. Pepper album cover had any influence on the animation were the costumes the Beatles wore. Pepper album cover had any influence on the animation. Were the costumes the Beatles wore on that album used as inspiration? We had the music and we would have discs of the music and things like that. And of course a lot of music was orchestrated as well. It does have an influence because I think the texture of the day, the music, the Beatles music,

it had that sort of quality to it that's difficult to explain. I think the brilliance of George Dunning is that he understood that quality and I think it comes over in the film generally. I think the fact that it's done in one year to me is, it's a one-off and there's no other film like it. All the animation films I've seen, I cannot find anything that says Yellow Submarine. Well, these are the roughs, basically, of the...

See, I remember doing these drawings. I remember when I finished, I wish I had time to go back and do more drawings. But there was no time. We didn't have that luxury. But the cleanups can look very nice if the original concept is working. They don't have to work as individual drawings, they have to work as movement. You know, because basically all of the movement is just a series of still pictures, it's nevertheless, it's illusion, isn't it?

Just as we were finishing up, as a cat tiptoed through all the sheets scattered on the carpet, we asked Tom a big question. Would he be interested in designing the cover to our yellow submarine issue? I'm not a designer, but I would... Illustrate. I haven't done anything like that for quite a while. But, you know, if you feel that I do something and it's terrible, fine. But if you want to, it's an interesting challenge.

Would you want the Beatles or would you want the meanies or something like that? We wanted it all. And Tom did an amazing job. So if you have that issue of Beatleology, Volume 1, Issue 6 from July-August of 1999, that cover was illustrated by Tom Halley. One last question. What did he intend to do with all his original drawings and sketches? Would he ever consider selling them to Beatle collectors? I don't know if I got a good offer. would he ever consider selling them to beetle collectors?

I don't know if I got a good offer. Because once they're gone, I don't have them anymore. So I don't know what they're worth, but if I got a really good offer, maybe. I don't know. So it would depend on the offer. I have no idea what they're worth. I feel all the animation drawings should be kept together.

You know, one time I thought, oh, I should frame these and sell them separately, but I think that would be sacrilege. It would indeed be sacrilege. Yellow Submarine, the film made in only 11 months by a company that had never made a feature-length movie before, designed by an art director who had never worked in animation, has since been heralded as a classic. Josh Weinstein, former producer of The Simpsons,

says Yellow Submarine shot torpedoes through traditional animation and gave birth to modern animation itself. The song sequences are considered masterpieces, and critics like Roger Ebert called it, quote, one of the most original

and inventive feature-length animated films of all time. Made 56 years ago, almost all of the people who worked on it have passed away now. George Dunning in 1979, Heinz Edelman in 2009,

Al Brodax in 2016, and we lost the warm and wonderful Tom Halley on January 26, 2017 at the age of 93. Tom was a devoted husband and father. He was also a musician. His obituary said he loved to play

the bagpipes and performed with the Burlington Pipers. It also said he loved to practice his piping at home, much to the consternation of his sons and neighbors. He once said this about Yellow Submarine, Truth, when discovered, is often beyond the human vocabulary to explain.

Yellow Submarine speaks to the heart, which seems, certainly to me, to be the door to the soul and truth. Amen, Tom. I'm Terry O'Reilly. This bonus episode was recorded in the Tearstream Mobile recording studio. Director Callie O'Reilly. Producer Debbie O'Reilly. Chief Sound Engineer Jeff Devine.

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