Hotel Transylvania (2012)
Produced and animated at Sony Pictures Animation and Sony Pictures Imageworks
Released by Columbia Pictures
I distinctly recall being at the cinema to watch Genndy Tartakovsky’s first film for Sony Pictures Animation. I had read much on the film’s production woes and of directors signing up for it and then vacating their chair (whether willingly or due to pressure.) In any case I was very much looking forward to the film and its clearly unorthodox style. Predictably I left the screening very impressed with the exceptional craft on display in the finished animation but decidedly less enthused on the film as a whole even if I felt it was altogether agreeable.
Watching it again I feel that the my somewhat dismissive feelings may have been misplaced. To be sure, the film opens with the seemingly requisite and terribly clichéd type of premise you expect to find in most family-oriented animated films today. In brief, Count Dracula loves his baby daughter Mavis very much. Consequently, he develops over-protective parent syndrome and even after his daughter comes of age he does everything in his power to stop her from leaving the safety of his hotel for the world outside (home to those dastardly humans!) He achieves this goal with manipulation and deceit - something he will deeply regret later on in the film.
This setup, while woefully unoriginal, is directed with enough flair for the viewer to forgive that it has been regurgitated and repurposed from the narrative corpses of countless other films. The rest of the movie is concerned with Dracula’s struggle to contain an invasive human presence in his vaunted “human-free” hotel (courtesy of a somewhat dumb yet oddly charming young American backpacker named Johnny.) This struggle gets far more complicated as Johnny – disguised as Johnnystein and claiming an improbably tenuous relation to Frankenstein – meets and befriends an increasing number of the hotel’s monster inhabitants, as well as Dracula’s daughter Mavis. Johnny and Mavis unexpectedly “zing” (the movie’s terminology, not mine), creating an additional problem for the doting father as the attraction between the two youths will only hasten his beloved Mavis’s departure, especially once she discovers that Johnnystein is actually just plain old human Johnny.
This premise sounds incredibly tired, and on paper indeed it is. Yet, under Tartakovsky’s direction the film is never really wanting for creative spark or wit, for it has plenty of both. For me it is unquestionably fascinating to see such an unambitious and rote narrative with similarly narrow scope bloom into something so undeniably memorable onscreen. No doubt the fact that the movie is populated with genuinely interesting characters helps immensely.
Indeed, Dracula is great fun to watch and is written such that his affection for Mavis and subsequent anxiety for her safety feels sincere and not tacked on simply to satisfy some marketing directive dictating that any commercially animated film has to emotionally manipulate its audience. It achieves this within the arguably limiting confines of a mostly comedy-driven approach. Mavis is delightful and easy to latch onto. She is portrayed refreshingly not as a bratty daughter, but as an adventurous and charming young woman respectful of her father’s wishes but not afraid to assert herself when the need arises. If her reaction on discovering her father’s betrayal seems fairly explosive, it is also volatile and the anger is short-lived, giving way to deep sorrow. The finished film truly captures her most rapturous highs and depressive lows – all this while economising on screen time. Johnny, on the other hand, is portrayed as incredibly goofy and borderline idiotic, yet it is difficult not to feel drawn to him – perhaps because beneath his very twenty-first century style and mannerisms lies an unquestionable heart of gold. To the film’s credit, Johnny’s character comes off as lovable rather than obnoxious because he has not been written to appeal specifically to modern youth by a potentially out-of-touch screenwriter (or, even less flatteringly, to ensure the film is hip and cool to its intended young audience by speaking their language – even if the writer’s only frame of reference is someone else’s kids.) The character is instead a direct satire of the sometimes shallow and vacuous members of the millennial and Gen Z generations. (Full disclosure: I am myself a millennial. Go easy on me.
)
The script is healthy and robust, with amusing dialogue exchanges bolstered by universally enthusiastic deliveries. That includes the much-maligned Adam Sandler. There were many rumours of persisting production problems on this film even during its final iteration under Tartakovsky – one of them being that Tartakovsky and Sandler were butting heads over the script. However, if these disagreements indeed happened and led to any sense of laissez-faire on the voice actors’ part (with particular emphasis on Sandler), then I did not detect it at all.
Nevertheless, I do not consider the humour to be among the script’s best assets even if it is the film’s main selling point. That is not to say the jokes fall flat. By all means, the gags are impeccably timed. Even the oft-reviled fart gag gets my blessing as it is genuinely funny. Still, in my case this is that weird breed of funny that amuses in silence, or at a deeper level of the psyche rather than producing audible guffaws. I am certain that this was not the writers’ intention!
More than anything else, however, this movie is truly exceptional in being the product of a singular vision. Regrettably, many other mainstream American animated films are marred by a persistent blandness induced by the very methods used to create them. Walt Disney Animation Studios has made some very good films in the last decade that I hold dear, but even the best ones - fine as they are - feel like the homogenised vision of at least fifty individuals, without a clear, much less irrevocable indication of the director’s stamp. This is the price one pays for film making by committee.
It is very strange to me that modern-day Hollywood comes out with allergies whenever an animated film director dares to get down and dirty, intending the finished film to prominently carry his or her fingerprints. This malady is normally cured quite efficiently either by unceremoniously kicking out the visionary from the director’s seat before the project is corrupted by any bold and unusual ideas, or by twisting a few arms and getting the rebellious film maker to comply. Thankfully, it is clear Tartakovsky was at the very least allowed to let his visual sensibility to permeate this film, and indeed
Hotel Transylvania can in no way be mistaken as the product of any other film maker or studio.
The film positively oozes style, both in its highly graphic art direction and character designs as well as the unusual approach to its animation. Eight years on I remain in awe as to what the artists and technicians at Sony Imageworks achieved and how they managed not just to stretch and squash, but to visibly and viciously distort the character rigs as they did here. It must have been a massive and complex undertaking.
I consider
Hotel Transylvania to be a tour-de-force of computer animation. There are unassuming moments, as when Dracula is walking down a corridor to his daughter’s bedroom, when the animation appears to simulate the held cel look of hand-drawn films. In traditional animation a held cel is normally used when a character moves only part of their body while the rest remains motionless. This was usually done either for reasons of economy, style, or both. Approximating this feat in computer animation is a brave move as most computer animators will tell you that unlike hand-drawn techniques, computer animation must keep moving lest it appear dead and lifeless. The eagle-eyed viewer will note that in such scenes the seemingly non-moving parts of the character rigs are not purely inanimate, but any animation employed is subtle enough as to barely register while still satisfying the aforementioned requirement for constant motion.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, there are moments where the animation moves so frantically it is truly dizzying, but in a good way. The characters move from one electrifying pose to another in just a few frames. This approach means there is prodigious use of the smear technique in the animation and this movie may have been the first computer-animated film to exhibit this effect so prominently and confidently.
Two years prior to
Hotel Transylvania, Disney Animation’s
Tangled also made noticeable use of smears. Interestingly, in that film I first mistook the technique for squash and stretch and felt puzzled as it seemed to be incorrectly applied. I later realised that the distortion was in fact a form of smear animation that the Disney animators employed whenever a character snapped out of a pose very quickly. This approach may seem inappropriate for a feature like
Tangled where the tone and style is so traditional and the character designs mostly grounded and less cartoony. Nevertheless, the smears work because the effect is subtle enough not to call too much attention to itself.
Hotel Transylvania takes the opposite approach in which the smearing and distortion are front and centre.
While an imperfect comparison, I would argue that
Tangled’s animated smears are analogous to what Chuck Jones achieved in his 1942 cartoon -
The Dover Boys at Pimento University, wherein the smearing took place between poses.
Hotel Transylvania’s approach aligns better with Rod Scribner’s animation for Bob Clampett’s 1943 masterwork,
Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs, where the distortions were not limited to a purely transitional effect. (Comparing two contemporary animated features to another two, much older Warner Bros. animated short subjects feels more than a little surreal, but there it is.)
In light of the passion and craft that went into the design and animation of
Hotel Transylvania I remember feeling outraged that on its 2012 release a not insignificant number of American film critics dismissed the film’s animation as lazy and cheap-looking. While I do not doubt these individuals’ credentials, including their knowledge of cinema history and film theory (they do write for some of the USA’s most prominent publications after all!), I do wish they would limit themselves to critiquing the aspects of an animated film they are qualified to assess and not comment so brashly on technical details they clearly have little knowledge of.
It is truly a shame that both Tartakovsky’s in-development projects, namely a
Popeye animated feature and an original project titled
Can You Imagine? were axed following a serious shake-up at Sony Pictures Animation. However, the studio has since rebounded from the creative nadir that was
The Emoji Movie and Tartakovsky has thankfully stuck around.
Notes on the Blu-ray release
Full Title: Hotel Transylvania
Year: 2013
Country: UK
Studio: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
Unsurprisingly, the 2013 UK blu-ray release of this title boasts absolutely dazzling video. There really is not much to say other than it looks about as perfect a reproduction of the digital master as the regular blu-ray format and its resolving abilities allow. Unsightly digital anomalies such as aliasing, macro blocking and banding do not rear their heads at any point throughout the presentation.
It is difficult for me to evaluate the audio as I was not quite myself while watching the movie. I felt fatigued and my senses were dulled. I can confidently praise the video despite being less than receptive to external stimuli at the time. It was easy to tell that the quality was absolutely excellent even if this was difficult to appreciate in my lethargic state. Sadly, I really didn’t register the aural experience at all. I am fairly sure the DTS-HD Master Audio track is fine quality, but unless I spin the disc again (hopefully in better circumstances) I cannot comment much on the soundtrack.
I have not watched the bonus features but I am very keen to check out the included audio commentary.
Julian Carter
(i.e. theatrical feature films, theatrical short subjects and featurettes, direct-to-video features, made-for-TV movies, TV series, internet films, commercials, etc.)
And it was started this year!! 
