Hotel Transylvania

The idea of monsters being more afraid of people than people are of monsters has already been done in Pixar's 2001 Monsters, Inc., but Sony Pictures Animation revisits the concept with Hotel Transylvania, and the results, while a little mixed, are still reasonably pleasant. This is the studio's first fully-animated film since 2009's Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, and like that film, it is a pretty rich visual experience.

The titular hotel was created by Count Dracula (Adam Sandler) as a refuge for himself and his daughter Mavis (Selena Gomez) as well as all other monsters, from the evils of humankind. Dracula is protective of Mavis because her mother, his wife, died when an angry mob of humans torched his castle when she was still a baby. Things go well, with the hotel regularly being visited by guests like Frankenstein (Kevin James), Wayne the Werewolf (Steve Buscemi), their spouses (Fran Drescher and Molly Shannon, respectively), the Mummy (CeeLo Green), and the Invisible Man (David Spade) among many others. Staffed by zombies, witches, and haunted suits of armor, it's a veritable monster paradise. For years, therefore, Dracula is able to keep his friends, and his daughter, close, and therefore shielded from the outside world.

Things go awry for Dracula, however, when Mavis, around the time of her 118th birthday (which makes her a teenager in vampire years) expresses her desire to see the world. Dracula has anticipated this period in her life and has prepared for it; he has an elaborate ruse set up designed to scare Mavis out of her desire to see the outside world. His ruse, involving zombies dressing up as humans and erecting a fake village, works in scaring Mavis back home, but as an unintended consequence, a most unwanted visitor follows the unwitting zombies, several of whom have caught fire, back to the hotel: a human named Jonathan (Andy Samberg).

Dracula, the first to discover Jonathan, is quick to conceal him by disguising him. He is unable to get him out of the hotel for one reason or another, but his real problem begins when Mavis meets the human and is almost instantly attracted to him.

This movie, saddled with narrative cliches and crude humor, is certainly not among the finest animated films I've ever seen, but it had enough going for it, like the interesting visual touch of Genndy Tartakovsky (Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Samurai Jack, Dexter's Laboratory) and some pretty funny visual jokes and one-liners, to keep me and my kids entertained for an hour and a half.

The crew's wonderfully stylized ode to Hollywood's classic monsters is certainly worth looking at, and to their credit Sandler and his "bros," James, Buscemi and Spade, are pretty good at transposing their live-action chemistry to their animated film. It's almost a shame they couldn't find a role for Sandler mainstay Rob Schneider.

The Sandler humor, however, is all too evident in some scenes, and often feels out of place in what is basically a family movie. Not only that, but the movie ends as most of Sandler's live-action films do, with realizations about growing up and an overly maudlin resolution.

The difference between a movie like this and a masterpiece like, say, Finding Nemo is all too evident when Dracula gives a long, schmaltzy speech at the end of the movie about children growing up and his having to accept that, which contrasts quite sharply with with minimalist, but infinitely more effective bit of dialogue from Ellen deGeneres' Dory: "You can't never let anything happen to him. Then nothing would ever happen to him."

Not only that, but there's a pretty fair-sized hole in the film's internal logic, but one which I suspect won't matter much to younger viewers. In any case, I won't spoil it here.

Still, the film definitely has a wonderful sense of whimsy and some truly laugh-out-loud moments, such as the "human attack" on Mavis at the beginning of the film. It's a rather flawed film, but an enjoyable one nonetheless, though I can say that there is nothing about this film that I feel is compelling enough to merit the 3-D premiums, so my advice to the parents taking their kids to see this is to skip the 3-D format altogether.

3/5