Jun 7, 2015

John Lennon Sketchbook makes its official online debut

"The John Lennon Sketchbook," a short cartoon by Yoko Ono and Oscar-winning animator and historian John Kanemaker, produced six years after John Lennon's assassination in 1980, has finally appeared on YouTube. Executive produced by Ono and designed, directed, and animated by Keinemaker, the film offers a poignant peek into the fertile minds of the Beatles, who not only created immortal music but also displayed their genius.

"I edited and produced the soundtrack, which consists of original drawings by John Lennon and snippets of conversations and song excerpts from John and Yoko," Kanemaker told Cartoon Brew. ''It's the first time a lot of the public has seen it [on YouTube].''

The short was born in 1985, when Kanemaker visited Hiroshima for Japan's first International Animation Film Festival and happened to find himself with an interpreter named Yoko Ninomiya (no relation to Ono), according to a 1987 commentary in How magazine. After making small talk about Yoko Ono, Ninomiya contacted Ono, and only a few months later Kanemaker received a holiday card from Lennon's widow, which marked the beginning of their collaboration.

Lennon was an "ardent doodler" with "a genuine ability as a graphic artist," Kanemaker explains in Howe.

"His landscapes are as strange as George Herriman's. Taken as a whole, Lennon's drawings are another valid aspect of his creativity, as biographical, imaginative, and visually distinctive as his music." [including the groundbreaking "Imagine," the realistic "What Gets You Through the Night," and Lennon's conversations about Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. anticipating his own murder. The official first public showing of "The John Lennon Sketchbook" took place at the Kane-Maker retrospective in Syracuse, NY in 1986.

The John Lennon Sketchbook is a poignant and dynamic portrait of Lennon's history and fandom that, nearly 30 years after its completion, is now within reach of anyone with a computer. Turn off your mind, relax, float downstream, and let us know what you think.