Genndy Tartakovsky spent years in television animation before this. His first feature, Hotel Transylvania, arrived in 2012 with a cast list longer than its running time and a premise built for a franchise. It is 91 minutes of monsters at a resort, and it is a waste of almost everyone in it.
Trailer, via Sony Pictures Entertainment.
Dracula’s Five-Stake Resort
The setup: Count Dracula, voiced by Adam Sandler, owns a lavish five-stake resort where monsters and their families can live it up and no humans are allowed. In 1895, after his wife Martha was killed by an angry human mob, he built the place as a safe haven from human persecution. He raised his daughter Mavis there. The tagline says it plainly: “Where monsters go to get away from it all.”
In 2012, on Mavis’s 118th birthday, she wants to see the human world. Dracula lets her leave, then rigs the trip. His zombie bellhops dress as humans and act threatening to frighten her home. The plan works. On the way back, the zombies accidentally lead a human traveler, Jonathan “Johnny” Loughran, into the hotel.
A Human in the Hotel
Dracula panics. He disguises Johnny as a Frankenstein-esque monster, passes him off as Frank’s cousin “Johnnystein,” then improvises that Johnny is a party planner hired to freshen up the hotel’s traditional, boring parties. Johnny becomes a hit with the guests. Dracula grows envious and afraid his friends will never return if they learn a human is among them. He coerces Johnny to leave. Mavis brings him back.
The cast is deep on paper:
- Selena Gomez as Mavis Dracula
- Adam Sandler as Count Dracula
- Andy Samberg as Jonathan Loughran
- Kevin James as Frankenstein
- Fran Drescher as Eunice
- Steve Buscemi as Wayne
- Molly Shannon as Wanda
- David Spade as Griffin
- Cee Lo Green as Murray the Mummy
- Jon Lovitz as Quasimodo Wilson
That is a murderers’ row of comic actors, and the film gives nearly all of them one note. Buscemi’s Wayne is a tired werewolf dad. Spade’s Griffin is invisible, which is the joke and also the whole part. Drescher’s Eunice gets the broadest material and lands the fewest laughs.
Tartakovsky’s 2D Physics, Wasted
Here is the part that stings. As a first-time feature director, Tartakovsky set out to use his background in traditional animation to bring the physics of 2D into computer animation, inspired by the physical comedy of Tex Avery and departing from the realism that had become standard in CGI. That is a real idea. It is the reason to hire him.
You can see it in flashes. Bodies stretch and snap. Dracula moves in quick, rubbery bursts. But the film around those bursts is a standard-issue family comedy about an overprotective dad learning to loosen up. The Avery influence shows up as motion, not as comic logic. A great Avery cartoon builds gags out of momentum and appetite. Hotel Transylvania builds gags out of a monster saying something anachronistic, then cutting away.
The film’s writing team is credited as Dan Hageman, Todd Durham, Kevin Hageman, Peter Baynham and Robert Smigel. Five writers, and the result is a plot that moves in a straight line with no comic detours. Dracula hides Johnny. Dracula loses control. Dracula finally admits the truth. Mavis and Johnny “zing,” a word the film treats as love at first sight and never makes funny.
The Zing Problem
The emotional core should be Mavis. She is 118, she has never seen the world, and her father has lied to her about why. Gomez plays her with a bright, eager energy the film does not deserve. But the movie is not interested in her. It is interested in Sandler doing a Dracula voice, which is a thin joke stretched across 91 minutes.
Sandler is not the problem, exactly. He is doing what he was hired to do. The problem is that the film mistakes a voice for a character. Dracula’s grief over Martha is a sad backstory, and the film wants credit for it without doing the work of making it hurt.
What the Numbers Say
Hotel Transylvania premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 8, 2012, and opened in the United States on September 28, distributed by Sony Pictures Releasing. It grossed $358 million against a budget of $85 million. It was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Animated Film. It received mixed reviews from critics, and its financial success launched a multimedia franchise.
The money is the real story. A $358 million gross on an $85 million budget is the kind of return that turns a movie into a series, and that is what the source says happened. A Golden Globe nomination for Best Animated Film is real hardware. Whether it reflects the film or the category is a fair argument, and this paper would argue the latter.
Our Verdict
Hotel Transylvania is not a disaster. It is a shrug. The animation has real snap, the cast is overqualified, and the premise — a monsters-only resort — is a good one the film never explores past the lobby. Tartakovsky’s 2D-in-CGI experiment is the most interesting thing here, and it is buried under a script that plays it safe at every turn.
What matters is what the film chose not to be. It had a director with a genuine visual idea and a premise about fear of the other. It made a movie about a dad who will not let his daughter date. The monster stuff is decoration. The human stuff is the plot. That is backwards, and no amount of Sandler growling fixes it.
For a film with this much talent in the booth, the flatness is the finding. It is a franchise starter wearing a comedy’s clothes.
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