ANIMATION, MAN
Artist who animated The Beatles’ ‘Yellow Submarine’ talks about his colorful life.
Given the esteemed nature of some of the things he’s animated over the years — TV shows like “The Smurfs,” “The Flintstones,” “The Rugrats” and parts of The Beatles film “Yellow Submarine” — Campbell is met with quite a bit of fuss for his low-key appearances, at which he sells new original art connected to the storied animated work he did in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s.
“I spent a whole life on deadline,” says Campbell, a native Australian. “So this is a very enjoyable thing to be doing at this stage in my life.”
When Campbell was a kid, his grandmother explained animation to him: “This idea that the cartoons I was watching were just drawings. Which was exciting, because at an age when most kids stopped drawing, I was still drawing.”
But jobs in animation were slow to find their way to Australia in the ’50s. Eventually, American shows started enlisting Australian artists to help with production. Campbell threw himself into it, “working frame by frame, and pleasantly surprised that I was able to earn a living almost right away.”
He started with a TV commercial, illustrating a centipede being engulfed
in bug spray. “Tedious work,” he says. “But they were paying me.”
Campbell was asked to work on the animated TV show connected to The Beatles, who by 1965 were an embedded cultural phenomenon. Though, even then, Campbell says the work came with no guarantees.
“The way popular music had been, there were very few perennials: Sinatra, Jimmy Durante, a few. But most people at that time had a hit song or two and then faded. I mean, who remembers Johnny Ray now? It was clear The Beatles’ music was terrific. But so was Johnny Ray’s.”
His work on “The Beatles” helped land Campbell a spot animating some scenes — like the Sea of Time sequence — in “Yellow Submarine,” the 1968 film with its iconic imagery and crisp use of primary colors, which Campbell calls “radically different than anything the studios or Disney were putting out.”
“We had no idea at all that the film would capture the spirit of the ’60s and be looked upon 50 years later as this iconic trip to that era. But it does present that sense vividly. The paintings I do try to capture that same feeling.”
From that point forward, Campbell’s path was set. He worked on all sorts of animated shows, even when his marching orders were ridiculous: Like the time he was hired to bring the worlds of the futuristic Jetsons and the modern-Stone Age of the Flintstones together. “I didn’t believe for a minute that would work, but it turned out successful,” he says. “I learned not to expect bombs. Somebody once told me about production for a show based on a strip. I asked, ‘Oh, yeah, what’s the strip?’ He said, ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.’ I
thought, ‘Hmm … good luck …’ ”
Campbell sounds happier with his work today, drawing familiar figures for enthusiastic fans, all without the deadlines that come with animation.
“There’s something nice about enjoying the attention in old age for what you did in your youth,” he says. “I never expected anything like it. I just retired and decided I wanted to keep painting.”