Created in 1986, Yoko Ono and Oscar-winning animator and historian John Canemaker’s cartoon short John Lennon Sketchbook has finally appeared on YouTube. Executive produced by Ono and
designed, directed, and animated by Canemaker, it is a poignant peek
into the fertile mind of a Beatle whose prodigious talents extended well
past creating immortal music.
“It was created from original drawings by John and a
soundtrack that I also edited together, consisting of snatches of
conversation between John and Yoko and song excerpts,” Canemaker told
Cartoon Brew. “It is the first time a large general public has seen it
(on YouTube).”
The short first came to life in 1985, after Canemaker visited
Hiroshima for Japan’s first International Animated Film Festival and
serendipitously found himself with an interpreter named Yoko Ninomiya
(no relation to Ono), according to a 1987 How magazine
explainer. After engaging in small talk about Yoko Ono, Ninomiya
contacted Ono, and Canemaker received a scant few months later a holiday
card from Lennon’s widow, marking the beginning of their collaboration.
Lennon was an “inveterate doodler” with “genuine ability as a graphic artist,” Canemaker explained in How.
“His landscapes are as strange as George Herriman’s. Taken as a whole,
Lennon’s drawings are another valid aspect of his creativity—a visual
one, as biographical, imaginative and individualistic as his music.”
Choosing around 75 sketches as well as samples of songs and
conversations from John and Yoko’s catalogues and interviews — including
the epochal “Imagine,” the pragmatic “Whatever Gets You Through the
Night,” and even a Lennon conversation about Gandhi and Martin Luther
King, Jr. that anticipated his own murder — Canemaker set about
transforming the late, great Beatle’s personal artistry into a public
film. John Lennon Sketchbook’s officially premiered arrived
during a 1986 retrospective of Canemaker’s work in Syracuse, New York,
before moving to parts outward and even back to Hiroshima, “where this
story began,” Canemaker mused in How.
John Lennon Sketchbook is a poignant and kinetic rendering
of John history and fandom that is now, nearly 30 years after its
completion, within reach of anyone with a computer. Turn off your mind,
relax, and float downstream to let us know what you think of it.
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