Heinz Edelmann, the multifaceted graphic designer and illustrator who created the comically hallucinogenic landscape of Pepperland as art director for the 1968 animated Beatles film Yellow Submarine, died on Tuesday in Stuttgart, Germany. He was 75.
The cause was heart disease and kidney failure, said his daughter, Valentine.
The movie's mod-psychedelic look, which typifies the era's spirited graphic art, emerged around the same time as the related psychedelic work of Terry Gilliam, Alan Aldridge and Victor Moscoso, but it has its own whimsical aesthetic. The bulbous Blue Meanies, which personify an evil mood as actual villains, pursue the innocent, well-coifed cartoon Beatles across an ever-shifting milieu of mysterious seas and holes that can be magically picked up and moved. The yellow submarine itself stops in an ocean of pulsating watches, representing time, to light a cigar for a friendly sea monster.
Notably, the designs prefigured contemporary music videos, especially in their use of dancing typography. Letters spelling out the lyrics "Love is all you need" morph into a strobing neon wallpaper pattern.
A highly successful advertising and editorial illustrator in Germany, England and the Netherlands, Edelmann was known for combining Impressionist and Expressionist sensibilities leavened with wit, humor and irony.
In the 1960s he was experimenting with a stylized, soothingly fluid, neo-Art Nouveau manner. That caught the eye of Al Brodax, the producer of a successful animated Beatles television-cartoon series for children. He chose Edelmann to be the chief designer of his first feature-length animated film, Yellow Submarine, built around a 1966 song of the same name, credited to John Lennon and Paul McCartney, with lead vocals by Ringo Starr.
It was not easy to get initial approval for Yellow Submarine. The Beatles were unenthusiastic about Brodax's more conventional-looking cartoon series (not done by Edelmann), Newsweek reported in 1968; their manager, Brian Epstein, was a stumbling block as well.
The tide turned, Newsweek said, during a stroll through the Tate Gallery in London, where Brodax and Epstein happened upon J.M.W. Turner's Peace -- Burial at Sea and marveled at that painting's intense colors.
"Wouldn't it be great if we could get those colors to move?" Brodax asked.
Epstein replied, "We would need great art."
Edelmann was the perfect artist, Epstein finally agreed, and Yellow Submarine had some of Turner's shimmering quality.
Born in 1934 in the former Czechoslovakia, Edelmann studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Dusseldorf. After graduating in the late 1950s, he began working as a freelance designer, illustrator, animator and teacher.
Besides his daughter, Valentine, who is an illustrator, Edelmann is survived by his wife, Anna, and one grandchild.
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