Submarine’s director George Dunning invited Edelmann to participate in the project, but when the artist arrived in London he was never given any specific instructions on what he should animate. Photo courtesy of John Coates.

JS: Missed it by that much. What would that picture have been about?

HE: That would’ve been volume one of Gulliver’s Travels. Unlike the Max Fleischer version which had been terribly developed, our version would have been a quite funny view of Lilliputian society, with a sort of tragic hero based on Adlai Stevenson.

JS: That would kind of on the obscure side, but I guess people watching the film wouldn’t have had to know who Stevenson was [the Democratic presidential candidate who lost to Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956].

HE: Then we also couldn’t get the rights.

JS: To Gulliver’s Travels?

HE: No, we also tried to do Lord of the Rings, which I felt should not be done as a straight feature because as a story, Tolkein wasn’t such a great storyteller. The magic is somewhere else. I felt it should be done as opera.

JS: Like Wagner.

HE: More or less. We tried to get the Rolling Stones to write the music so it would be rock opera. Our agent in London did work on that. Then he talked to the Bee Gees.

JS: The Bee Gees would’ve been kind of a drop down from the Rolling Stones. That would’ve been remarkable, working with the Beatles and then the Rolling Stones.

HE: I felt the Stones had this strength, to do something hard, opera like. Mr. McKellen is a good actor but I didn’t like his Gandalf. I must be the only one, in all honesty. Everybody else loved it —it must be poor jealousy on my part.

Edelmann’s book cover designs include Doctor Hoffman’s Infernal Dream Machines by Angela Carter, 1984 (left) and The Monstrous Slap in the Face by I. von Kieseritzky, 1981.

It was badly directed as well. These 12 black horsemen, they came across as pure stumblebums, idiots. Right then and there you can perceive that Mr. Sauron was being badly served and it couldn’t end happily for him.

JS: Have you done any animation work post-Yellow Submarine?

HE: I’ve done a lot of a lot of commercials. You wouldn’t believe it. I’ve stopped as I was saying and our daughter [Valentine] has taken over from me.

JS: You’ve trained a replacement.

HE: We’re doing commercials for French canned vegetables for Russia. We’ve done about 15 commercials.

JS: Are you a fan of any current animation?

HE: I think the one new production that measures up to the old Disney features is Shrek and Shrek 2. Everything is done to the best possible quality even easily where they could have cut corners.

There are a lot of tiny nice things, a lot of little gems which get thrown away on TV, which is a big shame. There is also some that is not Shrek but drek, but they are really little. I’ve been to the Aardman studio in Bristol, I did one commercial there. My favorite Aardman film is the first one, A Grand Day Out. I think this is very poetic and very light, this is true art. The Wrong Trousers is very much beloved and & much clever, but to me it doesn’t do, it doesn’t affect me the way A Grand Day Out affected me.

Now our daughter and all my former students, they’ve all been to the new Wallace and Gromit movie [Curse of the Were-Rabbit]. It’s nice, I’m going to buy the DVD of course, but it’s not A Grand Day Out. For that sort of simplicity, a lot of the early Aardman art is also quite brilliant.