prologue

The vividly animated computer sequences here, filled with amazing choreography, reminded me of director Alan Parker's stylized, surrealist take on Pink Floyd's The Wall. The animation is also a nice throwback to the Beatles' animated musical film 'Yellow Submarine.'”

The most fanciful of all is the largely animated sequence in which Eddie Izzard is Mr. Kite, the ringmaster of a psychedelic circus with a dancing chorus line of ‘the blue people.’”

He came back with a pair of books filled with his musings on the ideas I gave him. The books were stunningly beautiful in themselves...and you just knew that he got it.”

Strawberry Fields Forever was particularly interesting. The overlapping of Max, scared in battle, and Jude, angry with what the war has done to his relationship meld together to form one very powerful scene for such a melancholy song. The strawberries tacked to the wall, the strawberry bombs, the red paint - such an innocent fruit gone awry! The irony was genius in itself, and the visual effects mark it off the charts.”

These characters experience the gamut from falling in love to heartbreak, to jealousy, and even a call to activism in a war protest. The events coincide with the Vietnam War, and are all experienced through songs of the Beatles. The visual effects are stunning and really accentuate the psychedelic aura of that time.”

Here is a bold, beautiful, visually enchanting musical where we walk into the theater humming the songs. Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe is an audacious marriage of cutting-edge visual techniques, heartwarming performances, 1960s history and the Beatles songbook.”

I felt like a kid in a candy store, because if I said, ‘I would love for the strawberries to have gold leaf diamonds on top of them, the response wasn’t a frown and a line like ‘Oh, that’s really hard Julie, I don’t think we can pull that off.’ It was always a joy for Kyle.”