Hotel Transylvania

 

Kids up to a certain age (around 7-10) are bound to get the most out of Hotel Transylvania.  Let's face it, kids are fascinated by monsters, and this movie reinvents some classic movie monsters like Dracula, the Wolf Man and the Mummy into energetic and silly characters that children will instantly latch onto.  As for the accompanying adults, they'll find it watchable, but not very memorable.  Despite a fun premise, not a whole lot is done with it here.  Still, the animation is quite good, and the movie never offends.

According to this movie, Count Dracula (voiced by Adam Sandler, doing an over the top Bela Lugosi imitation) is really nothing more than a concerned single parent.  For the past 118 years, he's been closely guarding his only daughter, Mavis (Selena Gomez), from the outside human world.  In order to keep her safe, Dracula built a luxury resort for monsters, where the creatures of the dark (all of whom are really quite nice and misunderstood) can hide from the human tormentors.  As Mavis' birthday nears and all of Dracula's monster friends arrive at the resort to help celebrate, Dracula learns of his daughter's desire to see the world outside the castle, despite all of his warnings about how terrible humans are.  Mavis may be 118, but that's apparently a teenager in vampire years.  And like a lot of teens, she wants to get out of the house and enjoy her freedom.

It's right about this time that a college student backpacking across Transylvania named Jonathan (Andy Samberg) happens to stumble upon the monster hotel, and upon seeing the creatures, mistakes it for some kind of elaborate costume party.  Not wanting to cause a panic amongst his guests and friends, Dracula disguises the human Jonathan as a Frankenstein's Monster until he can figure out what to do with the wandering trespasser.  Naturally, during his time at the resort, Jonathan comes across Mavis, and it is instant love for both of them.  Will Dracula let the kids follow their hearts?  Honestly, at times, I wondered if the movie itself cared.  Despite some nice heartfelt moments, it seemed much more interested in sight gags involving Dracula's monster friends,  the Frankenstein's Monster (Kevin James), the Wolf Man (Steve Buscemi), Murray the Mummy (CeeLo Green), and the Invisible Man (David Spade).

Hotel Transylvania has a lot of energy, and is kind of frantic at times.  Director Genndy Tartakovsky got his start working on animated TV shows like Dexter's Laboratory, Powerpuff Girls and Samurai Jack, and the movie certainly does have the feel of a Saturday Morning cartoon with better animation at times.  I actually quite enjoyed the look of the film.  It's not as detailed as some big budget computer animated films, but it has a very loose and well-animated style that appealed to me.  I particularly found myself focusing on how Dracula moves.  He's very exaggerated, and can instantly zip about from one side of the room to the other, kind of like the classic Looney Tune shorts, where they would have the characters move faster in order to get to the jokes faster.  This movie takes a similar approach, only the jokes it's racing to are not quite as funny.  I smiled quite a few times, but the only true laugh I got was when the film made a joke at the expense of Twilight.

I'm probably making the movie sound worse than it actually is.  This is what I would describe as a "cute" movie.  It's very pleasant, and I smiled a lot while I was watching it.  But it never quite went that extra mile beyond "passable".  I wanted to enjoy the movie, and merely found myself appreciating it from time to time.  This is not the fault of anyone involved in the cast or the animation staff.  It's obvious that a lot of work went into the film looking and sounding great.  The problem lies with the script.  There are some good ideas, and a couple quiet moments that work (such as when we learn what happened to Mavis' mother), but on the whole, it doesn't stand out compared to much better animated films.  The recent ParaNorman did a much better job of mixing horror elements with a strong sense of humor.

 

Hotel Transylvania is being shown in both 2D and 3D formats.  I was lucky enough to get to see the movie in 2D, which made the colors much more vibrant.  From what I saw, I did not see any sequence that would benefit much from 3D, other than a wild chase scene involving flying tables.  If you ask me, that's not worth the inflated 3D price.  If you have kids who want to see this movie, try to see a 2D showing if you can.

See the movie times in your area or buy the DVD at Amazon.com!

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