Strawberry Fields (partially found production material from cancelled musical animated film; 1980s-1989)

Title card from demo reel shown at SIGGRAPH '87

Status: Partially Found

Strawberry Fields (also known as Strawberry Fields Forever, after the 1966/1967 song by The Beatles of the same name) is a cancelled animated film that aimed to be one of the first cartoon movies to use computer-generated animation. It was going to feature multiple songs by The Beatles, which would make it the second animated film to do so after Yellow Submarine (1968). Much of what is known about the film, including all visual material of it, comes from a news article that was published in 2019, when some production art from the film was revealed. It is sometimes referred to as some form of sequel to Yellow Submarine, but as more information has surfaced, it has become apparent that Strawberry Fields was not going to have anything in common with Yellow Submarine beyond featuring songs from the same band. It is possible that as much as ten minutes of test footage was shot of the film while it was in production.

Available Information

Veteran animator Jeff Merghart created the only art that is known to remain from the film’s production. The art that has been revealed online shows the film’s two main characters; a man named Jude and a lady named Michelle, as well as a snake named Oo Bla Dee Oo Bla Da, and unfinished art of an unnamed tiger. Other characters from Merghart’s art are described in the article, but are not shown within it. Merghart’s art shows that the art style of Strawberry Fields was going to be of high quality, with character designs not unlike those created by Don Bluth, compared to the relatively minimalistic and less expressive character designs that were used in Yellow Submarine.

Strawberry Fields was planned to be more story-driven than Yellow Submarine. Its overarching plot is unknown, but it was going to involve Jude and Michelle, and an accomplice, stealing a ruby from a museum. In addition to computer-generated animation and complex 2D art and animation, the film would also feature a cover of the Beatles song, “Come Together”, sung by Michael Jackson. The film’s ambitious plans turned out to be overwhelming. The biggest blow to the film’s production came when it was discovered that the production team did not actually have the rights to use Beatles songs in the film, and probably would not be able to obtain them. No further work was done on the film after that, and the project was cancelled in 1989.

Two books are known to include further details about Strawberry Fields; these are The 50 Greatest Movies Never Made (Gore, 1999) and Moving Innovation: A History of Computer Animation (Sito, 2015). So far, only the former book has had what is written about Strawberry Fields scanned. Unfortunately, Strawberry Fields is not one of the titular, “50 Greatest Movies”, that is thoroughly covered by the book. Rather, there is only a small paragraph about Strawberry Fields close to the back of the book, among similar small paragraphs about other cancelled films that were not covered in the body of the book. The paragraph describes Strawberry Fields as a “semisequel” to Yellow Submarine (this term is not elaborated on), which would be entirely computer-animated (this was probably never true). Most importantly, this is the source which claims that ten minutes of test footage were produced of Strawberry Fields. This might be the "grab bag of scenes" that were referred to in the 2019 article, and would most likely represent the most important piece of lost material from the film. A scan of this paragraph can be seen in the gallery.

As for Moving Innovation: A History of Computer Animation (Sito, 2015), this book is claimed to include multiple paragraphs about the production of Strawberry Fields, and specifically how the production took an extremely long time, became increasingly expensive, and had insufficient technology for completing the project.

Gallery

• 

  Tiger.

• 

  Jude.

• 

  Michelle.

• 

  Michelle.

• 

  Oo Bla Dee Oo Bla Da

• 

  The paragraph about Strawberry Fields from The 50 Greatest Movies Never Made (Gore, 1999).