The Beatles: Rock Band's brilliant mini-movie

Trodding heavily toward you like a 300-foot blue elephant in a band uniform, The Beatles: Rock Band video game will consume much of the industry's advertising bandwidth this summer ahead of its Sept. 9 release. A collaboration between MTV Games' Harmonix and the Beatles' Apple Corps Ltd., TBRB -- which had its press debut at the E3 gaming convention in Los Angeles this month -- lets players stand in the Beatles' pointy Italian boots, singing and playing along on peripherals fashioned to look like Paul McCartney's Hofner bass and Ringo Starr's Ludwig drum kit. That's coolness measured in Kelvins.

From the electronic entertainment industry's perspective, TBRB is a monster, arguably the biggest game of the year -- sure, all you need is love, but would it hurt to buy a few shares of Viacom, the owner of MTV? From a cultural perspective, TBRB is yet another occasion, like the Las Vegas Cirque de Soleil revue "Love," to ponder how lightly commercialism has settled on the Beatles legacy.

Video gaming might not seem all that sitars-and-gurus to those of us who lived the Beatles experience in real time; on the other hand, if TBRB means a few million young gamers get to hear this music on their own terms, that seems like a net positive. Here comes the sun again.

Summing up the Beatles' story is no easy task, and yet -- as per the conventions of video game design -- a summing up of the story, a reprise of the narrative world, must be built into the game itself. These mini-movies are called "cinematics," and they usually appear when the game is booted up. They are also crucial parts of a game's advertising campaign, amounting to online commercials that air endlessly and freely on YouTube and Hulu. These films are a rare instance of meritocracy in advertising art; the better they are, the more they get watched.

For TBRB, Harmonix called on London's Passion Pictures and director Pete Candeland, who have created one of the most beautiful and compelling animated sequences I have ever seen, a pocket masterpiece that in its surrealistic bravura is worthy of "Sgt. Pepper" and "Yellow Submarine." It's also startling in its economy, telling the Beatles' saga in 2:45 minutes. Not bad for a video game.