Review: ‘Hotel Transylvania’
Hotel Transylvania is an unrestrained, unabashed kids movie. Even with all the classic monsters INVOLVED, director Genndy Tartakovsky has no interest in joining this year's ParaNorman in being unafraid to scare a few kids. Surprisingly, that happens to be Hotel Transylvania's most charming trait.
As the classic mythology goes, Dracula (Adam Sandler) runs a high-end, invisible hotel for all his fellow monster buddies, from "Frankenstein" to the invisible man. It's not exactly a business venture, though, as it was mainly created to keep his daughter, Mavis (Selena Gomez), safe from the world of humans. Now, turning 118 years old, Mavis is coming of age and wants to explore the world, and Dracula will do everything he can to make-sure that does not happen. With all the talk of humans, it's no surprise one of them, Jonathan (Andy Samberg), actually turns up to both drive Dracula mad and fall in love with his daughter.
Even by reading reading that simple plot description, it's obvious Tartakovsky's monster-oriented monster movie is another sappy father-daughter relationship story. We've seen it plenty of times before in animation, and Hotel Transylvania, with the exception of having monsters INVOLVED, does not do much work to stand on its own. Still, even under the generic circumstances, Tartakovsky injects enough enthusiasm to make a slightly thin entertaining story.
How does he do it? By throwing a hundred jokes at the wall in every scene to see what sticks. Of course with that comedic approach, not everything is going to land. When a gag does not hit, Tartakovsky inevitably bounces back with a sharp joke we'd expect from his terrific career at Cartoon Network.
Much of the humor comes from the physical side of things, rather than a bunch of monster-related cliche jokes, roomates are actually funnier than one would expect from a relatively tame kid's movie. The designs, especially the downright creepiness of Quasimodo (Jon Lovitz), earn laughs. That animation is where Tartakovsky's voice shines through the most. All the character designs are playful, colorful, and evocative of their classic roots.
The idea of Adam Sandler voicing Dracula is not something most of us would ever think could be charming. To much surprise, Sandler manages to make the few hundred year old vampire's presence incredibly fun, loud accent and all. After the first few minutes of Hotel Transylvania, the Cynical thought of, "Oh, it's Adam Sandler and his friends having fun and getting paid," disappears. Sandler, Lovitz, David Spade, Kevin James, and more, namely CeeLo Green of all people, turn in lively voice performances.
When Hotel Transylvania is not moving on a few too many comedic tangents, Tartakovsky handles all the father-daughter fluff with enough care. The relationship, like the movie itself, it hits all the beats we expect in a quick, if slight, satisfying fashion.
The Upside: The character designs; jokes hit the mark more than miss; Adam Sandler as Dracula is better than the suggested casting news; fluff the father-daughter works; CeeLo Green as Murray the mummy.
The Downside: This is another animated movie where all the characters break out into song at the end: a few gags are not as clever as others; the humans in the third act.
On the Side: For some reason, Frankenstein's monster is called "Frankenstein" in the movie.
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