Hotel Transylvania (2012)
Directed by Genndy Tartakovsky
Welcome to Hotel Transylvania, Dracula's lavish five-stake resort, where monsters and their families can live it up and no humans are allowed. One special weekend, Dracula has invited all his best friends to celebrate his beloved daughter Mavis's 118th birthday. For Dracula catering to all of these legendary monsters is no problem but the party really starts when one ordinary guy stumbles into the hotel and changes everything!
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18 films that influenced Hotel Transylvania
What critics say influenced Hotel Transylvania
Written by Peter Baynham (Arthur Christmas) and Robert Smigel (Saturday Night Live’s “TV Funhouse”) from a story by Todd Durham, Dan Hageman, and Kevin Hageman, Hotel Transylvania essentially marries the monster/human fear reversal of Monsters Inc. (1998) with the overprotective-father-needing-to-let-go themes of Finding Nemo (2003)—and if those references seem a tad dated, bear in mind that Hotel Transylvania was greenlit back in 2006 and has been through nearly half a dozen directors.
However, unlike those films, Hotel Transylvania is overstuffed with on-the-nose humor and an underwhelming storyline that each borrow heavily from other animated films, especially Finding Nemo , without offering anything new or compelling to the mix.
Similar in theme from the recent re-release of Disney/Pixar’s Finding Nemo , this story is centered around an overprotective dad who’s trying to shelter his child from the big bad world.
Turns out that with its theme of an overprotective dad who needs to learn about letting go, “Transylvania” could also be aiming for some of the current “Finding Nemo” crowd — and the work is entertaining enough that such ambitions wouldn’t be completely deluded.
So “Hotel Transylvania” takes the overprotective dad premise of “Finding Nemo” and wraps it in the central monsters-are-scared-of-humans joke of “Monsters, Inc.” with a “Ratatouille” reference to boot.
An overprotective father, a slightly rebellious child and the big, bad world that's out there lying in wait — in " Finding Nemo ," that provided the sturdy framework for a lovely, funny, artful story.
Not since Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein have the great Universal monsters been subjected to such dismal treatment.
A sort of computer-animated revamp of the 1967 stop-motion Rankin/Bass production " Mad Monster Party?
They'd be better off checking out the far superior, infinitely cleverer 1987 gem "The Monster Squad."
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The story begins in 1895 (two years before Bram Stoker published Dracula), with the good Count (voiced in his best Bela Lugosi-meets-Zohan impersonation by Adam Sandler) deciding to construct the titular hotel as a refuge for monsters to get away from all the pitchfork- and torch-wielding humans who would like to do them in.
Indeed, there's more honest, eye-watering emotional truths in James Whale's Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein than anything here.
But the way it’s handled isn’t nearly as funny or as adult-oriented as, say, Steve Martin’s “Father of the Bride.”
And long before “Twilight” and its ilk, Tim Burton made the ghoulish seem normal with “The Nightmare Before Christmas.”
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No, film-killing bad is that the best that Lord knows how many credited and uncredited writers over the course of the film's lengthy, painful development could come up with for this monster hotel was to serve as the setting for yet another retelling of Romeo and Juliet.
Director Genndy Tartakovsky, a veteran of animated TV shows Star Wars: Clone Wars and The Powerpuff Girls, is tasked with bringing these disparate characters together, something that stumped the makers of 2004 misfire Van Helsing.